The Meta Tag Myth

The Meta Tag Myth

by: Bobby Heard

The more the better right? Wrong. At least when it comes to meta tags. The history of the meta tag started off as a nice tool that web sites could use to show the search engines what the site was about without the words showing up on the actual page. It seemed like a great idea until people started to abuse the meta tag. They would add highly searched for keywords that were unrelated to their site in their meta tags in hopes of attracting additional traffic. The search engines caught on and lowered the importance of meta tags they figured out that if they put more emphasis on the visible content of a site, people would have a much more difficult time ขcheatingข. Turns out that they were right.

Now, don’t get me wrong, meta tags still do carry some significance. They need to be consistent with the content of your site, but most importantly they’re somewhat of a measure of the legitimacy of your site. The most common myth when it comes to search engine optimization is that the best meta tag is the one packed with the most information. This couldn’t’t be further from the truth.

The keyword meta tag has been abused more than any other meta tag and does not carry as much importance as most of the others because of this reason. Most search engines only read the first few characters of the tag, if they read it at all, because they know that most keyword meta tags are filled with spam Just the same words repeated over and over. That is why it’s important to get your most important keywords to the front of your keyword meta tag.

The meta tag that still carries the most importance is the description meta tag. This is because it serves as a description for the particular page of your site that it is included in. Description meta tags should be unique to each page of your site, as search engines frequently use it as the description under your page title that appears in the search results. Obviously, you want your description to be representative of the page being displayed.

So in conclusion, don’t use meta tags the way we all have a compulsive urge to by packing it with everything that we can think of. It seems like a good idea, but it will only help you to fail in your goal of the holy grail: higher rankings.

About The Author

Bobby Heard is the VP at Abalone Designs and is an active writer of SEO articles. More articles he has written are available at www.abalone.ca/resources/.

This article was posted on December 18, 2004

by Bobby Heard

META Tags Explained and How To Use Them For Rankin

META Tags Explained and How To Use Them For Ranking

by: Frank Kilkelly

The META tags are used to provide extra information about a web page. There was once a time where a good search engine ranking could be achieved by simply changing the value of the META tags. However these days are long gone. Nowadays the META Tags are decreasing in importance in the eyes of the search engines who are using more sophisticated methods of ranking pages (namely link popularity, optimized anchor text).

There are many different types of META tags but the one that can affect ranking are the Keywords META tag and the Description META tag.

Keywords META tag:

This tag contains keywords relevant to a page. In the past search engines referenced this to determine how to rank a particular page. However many people started to abuse this and stuffed the tag with keywords that were not relevant to the content of the page. This confused search engines and subsequently returned weaker search results. To combat this less and less emphasis has been placed on the Keywords META tag. However this does not mean that it is entirely useless. Here are some reasons to still include it:

* Some search engines still use it

Although most search engines do not use the tag there are undoubtedly still some that do. For this reason place around 1520 keywords relevant to your site or page into the tag. Do not attempt to cheat the search engines by repeating keywords as this is considered spamming and they may look unfavourably on this.

* Account for misspellings of keyphrases

People can misspell certain keyphrases that you may be optimizing for so it is common to place these misspellings into the Keywords META tag. This allows you to rank in search engine results for misspellings without having to represent them on the actual content of your page.

Description META tag:

In the past this tag was used to specify the text that would appear in search engine results alongside the link to your site. Keywords could be placed into this text to influence ranking. However it was abused similar to the Keywords META tag and has befallen the same fate, meaning it is not as useful as it once was. Some search engines do not display it in their results (most notably Google, which retrieves the text from content on your page) and do not use it to rank a site. Having said that some search engines do still use it so again it is a mistake to ignore it completely.

Descriptions placed into this tag should, strangely enough, be very descriptive of the page or site they reside in. Include a few relevant keywords/keyphrases that you are optimizing for in the description and try to limit its length to 2530 words. Also try to use no more than two sentences.

Summary:

Although not as important as they once where, the META tags can still influence a search engine when it comes to deciding whether your web page is relevant or not.

Keywords META tag:

1520 keywords, include misspellings of keywords/keyphrases

Description META tag:

Include keywords/keyphrases, 2530 words, no more than two sentences.

About The Author

Frank Kilkelly is the webmaster at SEO Ireland http://www.seoireland.com/

SEO Ireland is a complete SEO resource site for all wanting to learn how to improve the rank of their site. The site features articles, forums and more.

Visit the very useful SEO Ireland Forum http://www.seoireland.com/forum/ and join the growing community.

[email protected]

This article was posted on January 15

by Frank Kilkelly