Are Meta Tags still useful in SEO?

Many years ago, meta tags are used as the primary tool to rank better in search engines. However, the advancement of search engine algorithms have made meta data of less importance in SEO. Before we get into it further, let us discuss what are meta tags all about.

Photo from businesseconomy.com

What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are the summarized information of a page for search engine crawlers. It tells the search engines what your site is all about. The most important elements of meta tags are meta keywords and meta descriptions.

Here is an example of meta tags. Here is what you will get if you search for my blog in Google.

You may noticed that the only visible element is the meta description. Meta keywords are not directly seen. This is the same for other elements.

The Death of Meta Tags
Google announced later in September 2009 that they no longer use "meta keywords tag" to rank websites in web results. Yahoo announced a month later after Google that they will no longer support the use of meta keywords tag (http://selnd.com/12yZNF). And according to Duane Forrester, a Senior Product Manager for Bing,they are still using meta tags as a signal to find spammers.

Google, Yahoo and Bing are the three giants of search engines. With the status of meta tags on their algorithm, is it still safe to use them? And if it's still safe, what is the proper format to follow? Is there any?

Conclusion
The three giants didn't ever mentioned that our site will get banned if we will use meta tags. So meta tags are still safe to use. In fact, this blog has meta tags (meta description only) on it. How about you? Are you still going to use meta tags? If yes, stay tune for my next post. It's all about how to create meta tags with different meta descriptions on Blogger blogs.