Another common belief is that meta tags will increase website rankings, but this
isn’t necessarily true. As we’ve mentioned before, meta tags are HTML elements in the code of a website – they’re bits of
(normally hidden) information about the information in the page. The information
in meta tags is used to communicate information that website visitors are
generally not concerned with.
Often websites put key words about the site in these tags in an attempt to
get noticed by the search engines. While SEO experts
have been known to disagree over whether meta tags actually work, most experts
dismiss the notion that meta tags actually help. Since numerous site owners use
meta tags with irrelevant content, search engines such as Google have learned to
ignore them. While they might have had an important part to play in the past,
the increased in the network speed and computing power available to search
companies mean they no longer tend to trust these summaries by webmasters, and
instead form their own opinions.