Meta tags are a great intellectual notion that has largely fallen victim to human nature. The basic idea is excellent: use a special html header designation called a “meta” tag to hold organized bits of meta-information (that is, information about information) to describe your page and site, who authored the page, and what the major content keywords are for your page. The information is there to describe the page to search engines but is not visible to the user unless he or she uses the browser “View Source” option to check the html code. Unfortunately, in the 1990s, search scammers began to use meta tags as a means to load in dozens or even hundreds of hidden keywords on a page, often in many repetitions, to bias the results of web searches. Because of these fraudulent practices, recent generations of search engine software either ignore meta tags or give them little weight in overall search rankings. Current search crawlers will also down-rank or ban pages that abuse meta tags, so the practice of abusing meta tags has become pointless.
Should you use meta tags on your pages? We think they are still a useful structured means to provide organized information about your site. And although search engines may not give heavy ranking weight to meta tag information, most search engines will grab the first dozen or so words of a “description” meta tag as the descriptive text that accompanies your page title in the search results listing.
The basic forms of meta tags are useful, straightforward to fill out, and cover all the basic information you might want to describe your page to a search engine