Metatags and SEO do you need any of it?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been of interest for years and to metatag or not to metatag is now the question.

Cropping up everywhere are SEOS (Search Engine Optimization Specialists). Not to mention SEO software. This means you probably better be guarding your rear pocket.
What do the SEOS gurus know that you do not?
Probably not much. However you will never know that to look at their blogs.

Metatags are still of interest to many website owners even though the top search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) do not pay much mind to them for ranking sites. It is a pretty well known fact that Google pays NO ATTENTION to meta-keywords in ranking sites. Still it is important to have a meta-description and meta-keyword tag in your document because the description tag is a brief summary of the pages content and the keyword tag is the summary list of the most important words on the page. Unfortunately over the years webmasters have abused meta tags which caused search engine creators to ignore their importance when setting up their algorithms.

Even thought metatags have been de-valued I still use them. I would rather be in control of what the spiders find than have them default to a random sampling of text instead.

So to use or not to use?

Alas that is left up to the webmaster. For those interested here is what you need to know.

1. DESCRIPTION meta-tag:
<meta name="description" content="...yada yada yada...">

This information is used by the search engine as a summary of the document. This should be a complete sentence (BE BRIEF) this should not contain format information.

2. KEYWORDS meta-tag:
<meta Name="keywords" Content="...yada yada...">

Your meta keywords do you absolutely no good if they do not fall into the text body of your document. If you are selling widget's and add "Madonna" to your keyword you are wasting space. You will be better served by keeping it relevant to your page text and the same keywords already used in your title and description.

If you need a little free assistance check out the Ranking tool from Google. You simply enter your site address and it will kick out how many times a word is referenced on your page. It gives you an idea what you might need to change.

Placing a list of 50 (even relevant) keywords on your list devalues your main keywords.

Your meta keywords should reflect the subject you are trying to promote. The fewer words you can use for that purpose the more potent your keywords become. Why? Lets use an example of this page. Metatags and SEO is what this page is about. Those 2 keywords are weighted according to how many total words I use in my page.

3. ROBOTS meta-tag:
<meta name="robots" content="all, none, noindex, nofollow">

Using this meta-tag gives you control over search engines that visit your site.
Your choices are:
INDEX - robots are welcome to include your page in their search.
FOLLOW - robots are welcome to follow links from your page in order to find other pages.

It gets a little tricky here ... this is the rule:
default = empty = all and none = noindex, nofollow

So "noindex" ... the page is not indexed but links are followed ... "nofollow" ... the page is indexed but no links are followed and "none" tells the robot to simply ignore the page altogether.

Other metatags to consider:

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">

IE6+ has a feature called MyImage Toolbar.
When enabled from tools ... internet options, provides the user with a popup menu over images that allows the user to instantly save, print, or email any image in a page.
The above tag will disable it.

<meta name="mssmarttagspreventparsing" content="true">

Have you ever been to a page with all of these little highlighted words and when you click on one it takes you to some advertising site that sometimes has nothing to do with your interest? Well it just might be "mssmarttags" exploiting your site. ANY text on your page can be used by other to advertise their product. This tag stops MS partners from using your sites as free advertising.

By now you are saying "well how do YOU know all this?"

Mainly I have been there done that. Back in the late 90's when people started to be interested in search engines (this was before Google) a think-tank got together trying to outwit Yahoo. Like now someone came up with software to do that. I fell in with this group and ended up beta testing that software. A standard got established that still holds true today. A few years ago I launched a new site and was again interested in SEO and metatags, so I purchased a package from GoDaddy to help in this process. I paid about $60 for information LESS than what I already knew from years ago. OH WELL.

The method IS fairly simple and ANYONE can adopt it. It has been a long time since I have bothered updating any of my sites so I have dragged this information out of my archives and am more than happy to share with all of you. Since I am doing a re-make on this tutorial site so why not?

SEO optimization GOLDEN RULES

Things a SEOS probably will not tell you unless you pay.

  • Register your domain name with one or two of your most important keywords as the URL!
    Your web address will be http://www.KeyWords.com or http://www.Key-Words.com. I personally NEVER register anything other than a .com.
  • Name your document with your most important keyword. As an example this page is a metatags.php with an include called metatags.html
  • Use your keywords in your link names along with your keyword named documents.
    Like <a href="metatags.php">Are SEO and Metatags necessary?</a>
  • <title>In one complete sentence use your keywords to name your site </title>
    This site example "Are SEO and Metatags of value today or not?"
  • <meta name="description" Content="SHORT description of what your site is about use only keywords used in the body of your page">
  • <meta name="keywords" Content="use, 20, or so, keywords, that you, want for your site only if they are part of the text in your site ">
  • <h2>Use as your top line introduction into your page your keywords</h2>
  • Compose a relevant first paragraph using your keywords. You in fact can use your description as your first paragraph if you like ... it is always good to switch things around a bit however.
  • DO NOT use your words over and over in your tags a "metatags metatags metatags" is just liable to get your site totally kicked off the engines and banned for spamming.

Good luck and have fun playing around on the ranking field.