Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Over the years it seems that one of the most misunderstood parts of your average web page has been the meta tags ... those tags that are hidden from the view of most visitors but that can do so much to influence how a web page performs in the search engines.

Over the years there's been a lot of information and misinformation published about meta tags and even today we're seeing the debate about the effectiveness of some of the tags continue on. Seriously you could be forgiven for thinking that by now the question of meta tags would have been settled but no ... even as recently as this week we saw the debate flare up again.

So let's look at a few meta tags right now. There are some funny ones, some useful ones and I'll leave the most controversial one till last.

The title tag
Of course, despite what some people say, we do know that a few of the meta tags are vital to how well we rank and whether or not we attract people who find our sites on search engine results pages. The title tag is a prime example of a tag that's vital ... use it for keywords that are relevant to the content on the your page and you stand a much better chance of ranking well than if you just use generic terms such as 'home' or 'about us' as many web designers do.

The description tag
Whenever I see 'experts' suggest that this tag doesn't matter any more I have to laugh ... they are so obviously showing how little they know if they feel that this tag doesn't matter. If you leave this tag empty you're trusting that Google or the other search engines will pick up some relevant and appealing text from the page and the chances of that happening are not great.

If you include text that will attract a searcher to your site when he or she sees that text in your listing on the search engine results page you have a much better chance of getting that searcher to click on the link to your page than a link that contains text picked up by the search engine.

It's the one tag that can really make your web page stand out from all the others so why doesn't it matter any more?

Revisit
Just the other day a friend of ours showed us an SEO plan that a supposed expert from India had sent him. It included this tag:

meta name='revisit-after' content='7days'

Now let me ask you two questions. Do you really think that you can control when the search engine spiders visit your website? Of course not!

Do you really want the search engine spiders to only visit your site once a week? Hell I want them back every single day so why do I want to try and tell them not come back till next week?

Including this meta tag in your web pages does nothing but show that you haven't got a clue. But wait ... there's an even worse one that a lot of Indian SEO “experts' are including.

Pagerank
I have to say that both Steve and I fell about laughing when we saw this one and it looks like this:

meta name='pagerank' content='10'

Yep ... you can always convince Google that your page has, or is worth, a pagerank of 10 ... of course you can ... NOT!

Keywords
Ah yes, I left this one till last and it's the meta tag that's fired everyone up again this week. This one is important for three reasons. It's important to Google because Google is facing some legal action over ranking pages that include trademarks in pages that belong to people other than the trademark owner.

So Google's mouthpiece ... Matt Cutts ... came out earlier this week and announced that Google does not use the meta keyword tag for ranking. What he didn't say was that Google ignores the keyword meta tag and I know for a fact that it doesn't.

How do I know? Because we have web pages that rank on the first page of Google's search engine results page for terms that only appear in the meta keyword tag. They don't appear in the text on the page ... they don't appear in alt tags ... they don't appear in comments ... they don't appear in anchor text ... they just appear in the keyword tag. And we've seen the same thing on web pages belonging to other people too.

So that's one of the other two reasons why the keyword meta tag is important ... regardless of what Google says we know that it works.

And the final reason why the keyword meta tag is important is that Google is not the only search engine on the Web. Bing ... you know, that search engine that's currently showing that Google has some competition ... does use the keyword meta tag.

Of course both Google and Bing may pay some attention to just what goes into the keyword meta tag. Years ago you could stuff it with as many keywords as you wanted but I would suggest that these days you should seriously think about limiting it to just two or three keywords or keyword phrases that are relevant and important for that term and resist the temptation to fill it with every word you could possibly think of.

And that's our contribution to the meta tag debate ... everyone is perfectly entitled to their opinion but try not to have one until you've done some testing and observing because, when it comes to meta tags, the debate is already filled with crap and misinformation.