I’ve been preaching for about 5 years that META tags are worthless when it comes to improving your search engine visibility.  I recently had to eat my words.

I played a roll in getting the MCG Jazz up and running by utilizing a custom template and Joomla backend.  Those of you who have used Joomla know that it does a nice job of spitting out well-formed HTML and META information.

One day I decided to see how the company’s name/search engine placement was doing in Google.  I typed MCG Jazz into the Google search bar and low and behold, in the #1 Position was the MCG Jazz Site, along with the complete description of the site as described in the META description tag in the header…the complete default Joomla meta description:

Joomla - the dynamic portal engine and content management system

My heart skipped  a beat when I soon recognized that the site was indexed with the META description that Joomla uses as its default.  I quickly logged into Joomla and added the meta description to the header:

<meta name="description" content="MCG Jazz's mission is to preserve, present and promote jazz..

Once I did that, MCG Jazz was soon indexed with a more appropriate keyphrase…one located in the META description tag. See for yourself.