Are Meta Tags dead (Concerned)

[staffjam]

Hi,

I have recently signed up with Parked, and so far am very impressed with their service.
I dutifully filled in the meta tags with powerful keywords and am now sitting back - waithing for the hits to come.
My concern is that i have been reading lots of articles, about how Meta links are dead and are no longer effective in search engine optimization.
Does anyone know if there is any substance to these stories, and if so is there anything we as the Parkees can do about raising the exposure and PR of our sites, or do we just sit there (I suppose that is what parked means)

Thanks for any comments...

 

[enlytend]

The Keywords meta is pretty much ignored - this is because in the past people used it for spamming to the point where it became irrelevant. Title and Description are still used - the description usually becomes the description snippet for your page when it comes up in a search.

 

[Varon]

Yeah, the meta keywords tag is no longer an effective source. Only the title and meta description tags are taken into consideration by the crawlers. There is not much you can do to build traffic to a parked domain. For example, creating links, running an adwords campaign for your parked domain etc..are against the TOS of most parking services and will get you banned.

 

[matt_bodis]

Yes keywords are COMPLETELY dead. I mean, maybe there are some small small small tiny search engines out there that look at it - but basically nobody uses them.

Also, meta descriptions aren't that useful nowadays either.

It is best to just have a title tag and some content on the page. That will give the best results.

 

[Kate]

Nowadays search engines do not pay attention to the meta tags but they are still important as the 'description' tag for example will usually reflect in search results.
So I recommend not to overlook them.
Of course the title tag is critical.

 

[nicholas]

For SEO purposes, meta tags may not be as useful as years ago, but they still serve a useful purpose, such as how sites (like directories) automate site descriptions taken from your site based on your meta-tags.

For example, I was surprised to see many directories with entries about some of my sites, all of whom I've found via search engines, with accurate descriptions and info, when I never visited those sites. Turns out they got the info from my sites' meta tags. So in this way and several others, it's still useful.