I’ve been preaching for about 5 years that META tags are worthless when it comes to improving your search engine visibility. I recently had to eat my words.
I played a roll in getting the MCG Jazz up and running by utilizing a custom template and Joomla backend. Those of you who have used Joomla know that it does a nice job of spitting out well-formed HTML and META information.
One day I decided to see how the company’s name/search engine placement was doing in Google. I typed MCG Jazz into the Google search bar and low and behold, in the #1 Position was the MCG Jazz Site, along with the complete description of the site as described in the META description tag in the header…the complete default Joomla meta description:
Joomla - the dynamic portal engine and content management system
My heart skipped a beat when I soon recognized that the site was indexed with the META description that Joomla uses as its default. I quickly logged into Joomla and added the meta description to the header:
<meta name="description" content="MCG Jazz's mission is to preserve, present and promote jazz..
Once I did that, MCG Jazz was soon indexed with a more appropriate keyphrase…one located in the META description tag. See for yourself.
Meta tags really don’t have any value besides the description tag which is shown in the serp listing. It doesn’t influence your position at all. I tested it myself, and I have to tell you that someone probably linked to your site with those keywords or google rooted the keyword (Eg: looking up spiders automatically also implies spider and spidered and spidering).
link exchange?