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Are meta tags important for SEO?

D

daj

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 14, 2006
7
0
It's been awhile since I paid attention to SEO for my websites (pay per click changed a lot of things), but the website I'm working on in iweb is one I don't plan on paying for advertising. Are search engines still using meta tags to locate and rank sites?

Any guidelines for adding them to my iweb pages? Any code I shouldn't mess with?

TIA
dj
 
Google do not use Meta keywords to rank sites.

I think they use bots to analyze the content, and rank the pages depending on how many "high-ranking" sites are pointing to your site, your domain, title of your page, etc.
 
I read that others search engines use them, but Google ignores them because people used keywords that were not related, etc.
 
no.

simple question, simple answer.

The only thing Google uses is the description, which displays as the description on the results page.

If that is missing it just takes some text from the page relevant to the users query. No weighting is given the the content in the description.

The key to "SEO" is accepting that in the long term there are no tricks or shortcuts. Focusing time and effort producing great content will do your web-site the world of good.
 
Eh - yes, and no. For Google they're not particularly important (although saying that Google ignores them is a lie). Google doesn't use them in it's first set of criteria, but as you move further down the line, it does employ some of your META tags to make a final determination on page rank. Pages with META tags that are nearly identical to search criteria will outrank similar pages with less accurate META tags.

That said, here's a pretty good "template" of sorts for all your pages. It covers all the important META tags that are still in use by various engines, so you should always fill them in just in case (whether Google uses them or not). If you use TextMate, skEdit, Dreamweaver or any other decent text editor, you can save this as your XHTML template and you'll always be good to go:

HTML: 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
<title>My Page Title</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="Author" content="" />
<meta name="Copyright" content="" />
<meta name="Subject" content="" /> 
<meta name="Keywords" content="" />
<meta name="Description" content="" />
<meta name="revisit-after" content="7 days" />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />

<link href="my_style_sheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

<script language="Javascript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
Any js goes here
//-->
</script>

</head>
 
I would also suggest you keep putting meta data in your pages. Google isn't the only search engine on the planet and you can pick up some decent traffic from other sources.
 
I too am asking a stupid question. But I'm stupid. Will my iWeb site start to appear on Google searches? Without Meta Tags or a description?
 
F.D. said:
Will my iWeb site start to appear on Google searches? Without Meta Tags or a description?
Click to expand...

Yes, Google only uses the description meta tag for the description under the blue link. If it is unavailable then it will just take some text from the page.
 
Meta tags are reviving back on search engines.

Meta tags seems to loose their significance in 2007, but in 2008, SEO Meta tags are must :)
 
The best answer is a compilation of previous answers - i.e. it's important to have well defined and accurate meta tags (of which the example posted above including the DTD and various header tags is superb) as well as the content side. That, in combination with a well defined robots.txt to tell most bots which portions of your site may be indexed, is the key so successful indexing.

I'd focus on these 3:

The KEYWORDS should include singular and plural incarnations of words, around 250 words or so maximum if possible since most search engines parse at that length. The words should be prioritized by importance, and relative to the content and focus of your web site.

The DESCRIPTION should be brief, focused on the purpose and content of the web site, and brief is better as again this is parsed strictly by most bots.

The TITLE will be optimized in most search results better if you include the site name followed by a colon or some separator and then the page name, which also helps users know where they are (similar to a breadcrumb trail but very simple). This also helps if someone bookmarks a specific page and links directly to it, as the title will include the site name. Oldest trick in the book and it works well. This is a strong, strong, suggestion.

Example:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN'>
<html>
<head>
<title>Minority Business Development Agency Interactive Web Portal :: Home</title>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]<link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">[/FONT]
<meta name="keywords" content="Minority,Business,Development,Agency,MBDA,Department,Commerce,Home minority,enterprise,minority business,minority owned business,phoenix,opportunity, fedbiz opps,central contractor registrar,forecast of major procurement, funding,financing,start-up,development,entrepreneur,e-commerce,contracts,certifications, medweek,mbda.gov,business,businesses,commerce,procurement,making money,making profits,business plan, african american,development agency,small business administration,government agency,government agencies, department of commerce,business development,minority business development,8a,business plan writer, mezzanine finance,mezzanine financing,capital resource locators,capital-resource,capital-resources, contract opportunities,katrina opportunities,small business loan,small disadvantaged business, limited liability corporation,loans,gulf,sba,mbe,mboc,mbda,mbec,smobe,doc.gov,capital,revenue,wealth">
<meta name="description" content="The Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) - Department of Commerce - Home">
<meta name="DC.creator" content="Minority Business Development Agency">
<meta name="DC.date.created" scheme="ISO-8601" content="2006-09-22">
<meta name="DC.date.reviewed" scheme="ISO-8601" content="2006-10-02">
<meta name="DC.date.language" scheme="DCTERMS.RFC1766" content="EN-US">
<meta name="DC.location" content="Department of Commerce Washington D.C.">
<meta name="author" content="Jim Goldbloom, Senior Web Developer, Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA)">
</head>
Click to expand...

Note: Since the site I used to get these headers from is part of a larger government entity, the "DC." prefix refers to the optional "Dublin Core" method of recording meta tags which are formally recognized by most major bots and won't be discarded when indexed. The schema is linked in my example above, if you don't use Dublin Core, remove the <link> line.

Finally, an example robots.txt (edit/upload to your document root):

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /apps/
Disallow: /errorlog/
Disallow: /config.php
Disallow: /classes/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /fastfind/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /statistics/
Disallow: /editor/
Disallow: /errorhandler/
Disallow: /uploads/
Disallow: /upload_temp/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Click to expand...

EDIT: For information on setting up your own robots.txt please visit: http://www.outfront.net/tutorials_02/adv_tech/robots.htm

-jim
 
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