Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

This is basically a link to an article that initiates the discussion on how important are meta-tags in SEO. I know lots of people advise building up those tags, but perhaps it`s worth rethinking.

The article is called "Death of a Meta Tag," and worth reading in the context of a growing interest in SEO.

thanks for the link Craig,  interesting.

Rich

Meta tags are extremely easy to game, and as a result it`s widely accepted that their effect in search engine ranking algorithms is minimal to none - that article is from 2002, so as you can tell this has been the case for some time.  Moving beyond that issue, there are even situations in which using the tags can be detrimental, as Google and other engines can potentially penalize you for duplicate content, and one potential indicator could be identical meta tags across your content.

So unless you`re going to go to the trouble of carefully analyzing each page and assigning a distinct meta keywords tag for each, you may just be better off leaving it out of your code.  As for the meta description, it may still be worthwhile developing distinct tags for each page, as they can, in some cases, be pulled into the text that shows up for your site in a search engine results page (the text below the linked title is sometimes pulled from the meta description).


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chuck fuller

Amen to duplicate content!, I just had a case like this one about two weeks ago with one of my clients web site..
I resolved the issue, and moved forward with the Web Site.

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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net

Yeah, that can be a huge problem for a lot of sites, and addressing it can have a measurable impact on search rankings and traffic.  I`m sure you`ll see effects soon if you haven`t already Edgar.

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chuck fuller

My experience shows slop marketing by plastering page after page with random keywords within the meta tags.  It will hurt rankings.  If the technique is used carefully, it will help.  The keywords, title, and description alone need relevancy to the specific page and not the site.

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Agreed: It`s all about how each page has explicit relevant content. That`s the main problem, actually, of SEO writing---to find different content on each page, all related to the main site, but covering different key phrases.

Key phrases trump metatags almost always. But it can`t hurt to at least have valid key words in the metatag area, I think.