In the mid to late 1990’s, all one really had to do was to put the right keywords into the meta description and meta keyword tags, and you were set to be ranked in the search engines.

Well fast forward 15 years, and the search engines no longer view the meta tags as the best source of information, mostly because the tags were spammed with irrelevant keywords for so many years.

The goal of a search engine is to match a question with an answer.  Your question is the search engine query, and your answer is the search engine result page.  The better the answer that a search engine can give, the better it is at doing it’s job, and the more likely you are to use that search engine exclusively.  So the search engines do have some motivation to provide you with the best answers possible.

So is it possible that the meta tags are being used by the search engines to provide quality results to search engine questions? Yes and no.

No they aren’t the exclusive ranking mechanism that you would’ve found 15 years ago, and there is no guarantee that all search engines are using them at all.

But Matt Cutt’s, one of Google’s own engineers, had put together a video that explained that the meta description tag is sometimes used as the descriptive statement that goes in the search engine result pages, underneath the title of the result.  The meta tag is used if it finds the content of it a more succinct fit to a result page than what it can compile on its own.

This said, I’ve found that providing your own meta description won’t always be on display, but by having it available, it gives search engines an opportunity to display your better written teaser message to get a search engine user to click your link, rather than your competitor.

The meta keyword is still out for open discussion, but I’m of the camp that they are used in certain “related terms” algorithms that use it as a list of terms that a page might also be relevant to, even though the keywords aren’t specifically in the content of the webpage.

I make sure that every page I have has proper meta tags for both keywords and descriptions,  mostly because I’ve seen what the end result can be if they are in there, and what the end result can be without them.