In the good ol’ days of search engine optimization (SEO), optimizing a website meant putting in some H1 and H2 headline tags and some description meta tags in the plain old vanilla HTML code and then pointing a search engine at it which would lap it up, index it deep and present it high. Ok, that was last century and in terms of the web where lifespans are measured in dog years we have now had about 105 years of continuous development so that piece of information has more value as a relic of practices of the past (like leech therapy for example).

But as leech therapy is making a comeback so it would be unwise to dismiss the importance of meta tag optimization in your website. The reason is that, increasingly, in an overcrowded web where the basics of SEO are now relatively common knowledge what decides the edge between competing websites are the tiny, usually insignificant details such as meta tags.

Google pays so little attention to them these days that perfect optimization there plays an almost insignificant role. When your site is competing against amateurs then on-page optimization to that degree means little. Go toe-to-toe with an equal however and the accumulation of details begins to tell and that’s where your diligently meta-tag optimized web page begins to gain traction.

So there you have it and in case you were wondering leeches are back in vogue and, like meta tags, used selectively in order to gain advantage in special situations.