Wow. No. Please. Definitely not! Meta Tags are a small part of SEO and it’s true and has been true for many years that the Meta Keywords tag is not very useful and mostly ignored by search engines. But Meta Description and a lot of the other meta tags are certainly still very much relevant. Meta Tags are a part of technical SEO which is all about making sure content, coding and scripting is clean, to web standards and is semantically correct. Good SEO is very much like baking a delicious cake. you need the right quantity of ingredients, in the right orders, mixed correctly and some tender loving care.
So no SEO is not just about Meta Tags.
So What Else Makes A Winning SEO Campaign?
Lots more. Content, back links, good design, a website which is task orientated with great user experience, and so on. You can’t really neglect any of these aspects, especially if competition is tough. But, if truth be told, you can probably get away with under-representing a few of these areas that make up good SEO, if competition for the keywords you’re looking to rank for isn’t that strong. However, if this is the case, it’s probably only because you’ve found a relatively untapped niche. Since businesses look for these niches, they’ll likely catch up at some point down the line and overtake you. So you’ll probably be better off future proofing your website’s SEO to an extent before the “herd arrives”. Having said that SEO usually requires constant effort to stay on top of the competition.
So Which Meta Tags Are Important?
So we’ve established that Meta Tags are important (not Meta Keywords but the other ones) but aren’t the be all and end all. Meta Description though is one of the most important Meta Tags because you can have a good go at tweaking how your search engine results will look. So certainly don’t neglect this one. If you do then Google et al will still do a pretty good job of grabbing a Meta Description from page content but it’s usually much better if you take control of this and decide which snippet Google and other popular search engines (Yahoo, Bing, etc) will see.