Meta tags carry with them a lot of debate over their usefulness in an SEO
campaign. Traditionally, however, they weren’t designed specifically as a method
to improve rankings with meta search engines. They are primarily, coding tags
that enable the website architect or website owner to relay certain attributes
and bits of information about a web page.

Meta Search Engines

Search engines realised that these tags contained a lot of useful information
that they could use in formulating their search result pages. As such, tags
like the keywords, title, and description tags became a major part of SEO.
In the early days of search, when the engines relied almost entirely on Meta
data to give them the necessary information, it was possible to get a site
ranked highly by doing little more than including the right information in
the right tags and then reinforce this information in the actual body content.

Early Search Results

Websites that employed the most important meta tags were, therefore, getting
a lot of exposure without necessarily including any relevant information. Soon,
the search engines changed the way they indexed pages and concentrated on factors
other than Meta tags.

Relevant SEO Meta Tags

However, there are still some tags that are relevant to an SEO campaign.

• The keyword tag has become less useful as a guide to what your page is
  about, and is now used as more of a warning for the search engines of sites
  that might be engaged in keyword spamming. Only include relevant keywords
  that actually appear on the page and don’t overdo it.

• The title and description meta tag are used when compiling search results
  to give potential visitors a brief snapshot of what your page contains. As
  such, these are vitally important tags that you need to include. Make them
  insightful and relevant, catchy and compelling. Include one or two of your
  primary keywords if possible but don’t simply list all of your keywords as
  a description.

There are many other meta tags that a site can deploy. Some give information
to search engine spiders and can even control the way a spider crawls a website.
Others impart information to the visitor’s browser on how a page should be
handled. However, tags alone will not boost your ranking.