HTML meta keyword/description element, useful or n

Question

Does filling out HTML meta description/keyword tags matter for SEO?

Answer 1

This article has some info on it.

A quick summary for keywords is:

Google and Microsoft: No

Yahoo and Ask: Yes

Edit: As noted below, the meta description is used by Google to describe your site to potential visitors (although may not be used for ranking).

Answer 2

If you want your users to share your content on Facebook, the meta tags actually come in handy, as Facebook will use this information when styling the post.

See Facebook Share Partners for more information.

Edit; whoops, wrong url. Fixed.

Answer 3

Keywords: Useless

All major search engines don't use them at all.

Description: Useful!

Replaces the default text in search engines if there isn't anything better. Use this to describe the page properly. Not perhaps useful for SEO, but it makes your results look more useful, and will hopefully increase click through rates by users.

Answer 4

If your pages are part of an intranet then both the keywords and description meta tags can be very useful. If you have access to the search engine crawling your pages (and thus you can specifically look for sepcific tags/markup), they can add tremendous value without costing you too much time and are easy to change.

For pages outside of an intranet, you may have less success with keywords for reasons mentioned above.

Answer 5

The problem with keyword meta tags is they are a completely unreliable source of information for search engines. The temptation for people to alter search results in their favour with misleading keywords is just too great.

Answer 6

The description meta is important as it is displayed ad-verbatim on Google search results below your site title. The absence of which, Google pulls and shows the first few lines of content on SERPs. The description tag allows you to control what SE users see as a page summary before clicking. This helps in increasing your CTRs from Search.

The keyword meta usefulness is still inconclusive, but SEOers continue to use them. Avoid using more than 5-6 keywords in the tag per page to avoid Google from detecting and penalising due to any suspected keyword dumping.