Are Meta tags very useful today in SEO campaign?

[Grenelle]

[Roger]

None of the major search engines use the meta keywords tag. The meta description tag should contain your keyword but more important is the title tag, not officially a meta tag. The best places to add your keyword are:
Title tag
URL
H1 tag
Internal link anchor text
External link anchor text
First 50-100 words of HTML (body text)
meta description tag

[Labony]

Meta tag is very much important matter to index the site to search engine. SEO is one of the most effective way to get your web site optimized in such a way that the search engines will reward you by basically sending traffic your way. SEO is not really that simple, but the bottom line is, if your page is optimized both on page and off, you generally get higher natural search engine rankings, which leads to traffic for you.

[Tommy]

Hi Grenelle,

Depending on your location, some meta tags might not be as useful in SEO.
For example, in the United States, the big search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are not using Meta Keywords, and Meta Description in their algorithm to rank pages. However, Meta tags such as the H1 header and Title Tags are still used and an important factor in their algorithm.

However, if you are a news website, Google will use Meta Keywords to ranking. (ONLY if you are a News Site).

If you are targeting the search engine, Baidu, in China, they still use the meta tags in their algorithm.

However, if you are talking about usefulness of meta tags, Title Tags and H1 headers are definitely useful since they are a factor Google looks at. HOwever, Meta Descriptions are also useful since they appear in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and businesses can optimize it to attract customers.

[Mike]

Absolutely, Meta is always the most important factor in SEO campaign. Search engine will take Meta to judge your website theme, content, etc. That's a very powerful SEO factor.

[Polly Green]

Yes, META tags are very important today in SEO. Using keywords that you want to show up for in search engines should be used with your META. If you want to show up organically in search engines I highly suggest you use the META description with your 1-2 organic keywords.