Once the darlings of the search engine spider, the influence of Meta tags vanished completely. This article discusses why and whether they may be making a very weak comeback.
Meta tags, specifically the keyword and description tags, are designed to provide quick, thumbnail sketches of a web pages content in order to better classify it. At one time, the meta tags were a key factor in on-page optimization for almost all search engines. That one time was around the late 90s. It soon became apparent that a reliance on these tags could be exploited, and exploited it was. Today, after the fall of the meta tag, they are making a partial comeback as very low-weight on-page optimization factor.
The influence of the meta tag, especially the keywords, faded away once most major search engines either dropped them entirely from consideration in their algorithms or greatly reduced their weight. This happened in response to the vast amount of meta-spamming that took place once their power was initially discovered. Techniques we all recognize today as blatant keyword spamming were commonplace. Webmasters added completely irrelevant, but highly searched terms (particularly adult terms) to a sites meta tags, usually in concert with similar hidden text blocks. These techniques were done only to drive traffic to their sites, highly untargeted and generally unrelated traffic, but traffic nonetheless.
Search engines responded to the problem once they realized their results were no longer relevant. It seems Google completely ignored the meta keywords in response to the blatant spaming. The fall of the meta tags gave rise to a still strong trend today, that of on page text analysis for keywords. Instead of blindly looking at the meta tags to classify a page, search engines turned to the actual content of the page. Text in paragraphs and titles rose to importance, as well as other indicators like text in alt tags from images. These factors produced better results for the people using search engines. In theory, the meta tags were a simple, easy way for people to help search engines classify and rank their pages. In practice they were highly abused, as the commodity the search engines provided became very important, especially to the budding ecommerce community.
Today meta tags may be making a quiet comeback. Years have passed since the blatant, irrelevant spamming that caused them to be so thoroughly discredited. With penalties in place, search engines have a way to punish those who would use such techniques. Wise, conservative use of your meta keywords and description tags can only be beneficial. Today the meta description tag sometimes serves as the small page sample Google uses on its result pages.
Like anything concerning search engine optimization, especially Google search engine optimization, make sure your meta tags appear to be as natural and people friendly as possible. If your description is just a word-for-word rehash of your keywords, that will not look natural, and may be a red flag to a search engine spider. Write out an actual description that a person would be able to read and understand. Use your keywords in the description, but dont repeat them. A single sentence or phrase should suffice, 2 at the most. The description is not a place to put a summary paragraph. The more words your description has the more watered down it becomes to the search engine.
Advice on the meta keyword tag varies a lot, but concentrate on your core keywords/keyphrases, placing the most important ones first and moving through to the least important. Dont use 50 keywords, even if you believe your site does, in fact, address all 50 in perfect detail. Keep the list short, and focused. Twenty is a good maximum, and only if you feel you absolutely must target all 20 keywords. Remember, its difficult to very effectively optimize a single page for more than 2 or perhaps 3 keywords. If you have a large number of them, then consider spreading your optimization efforts out across internal pages for certain topics. You can make these into landing pages that are specifically optimized for your secondary keywords. Note I said landing pages and not doorway pages. Doorway pages imply pages targeted to a specific search engine that generally employ spamming techniques. A landing page is a natural part of your existing site, say a section title page, that you perform general on-page optimization on for a subset of your keywords.
Meta keyword and descriptions do not have the power they once did, and they never will. Giving that much weight to such an easily abused page attribute was a mistake the search engines eventually corrected. Today, your keywords and deceptions can provide you some small benefit if they are well crafted and devoid of any spaming techniques. Construct a friendly, natural description and choose your core keywords wisely and your meta tags should help you out, if only a little bit.
About the Author:
Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, , , and web design services to a wide range of customers.
Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support.
Note: These articles are provided for general interest and content purposes only, and should not be construed as support materials. Apollo Hosting does not guarantee the information contained within. All articles are free to reprint so long as they remain unchanged, the About the Author section remains, all hyperlinks are preserved, and the rel=nofollow tag is not added to the hyperlinks.
Keywords are the most important decisions an SEO must make when starting out. Choosing the right keywords will determine the overall SEO strategy and can make all the difference, saving both time and expense in the campaign.
The core of most Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, work is good planning. Virtually all future efforts will be based on the initial choices made about goals and strategies. Chief amongst these choices is that of keywords. The keywords chosen will determine how much of a struggle the SEO efforts will take and what kind of strategy will be used. This is why careful analysis is required in the choice of keywords. Choose poorly and the consequences in terms of time and money can be steep.
Building The List
The keyword choice process is one of elimination. The first step is the easiest, brainstorming as many candidate keywords as possible. The hard part is taking that big list and picking out the truly worthwhile entries. When brainstorming, think in the broadest terms possible about the products, services, and industry in which the business operates. The object is to create a very broad list, as it will be more likely to contain the terms best suited to the overall SEO strategy chosen.
Process of Elimination
With the list prepared, it is time to start eliminating choices. Keep in mind the following basic SEO rules when doing this. First, any one page, including your websites homepage, can only be effectively optimized for 2-3 keywords or keyphrases. This number can be higher, but that depends on the use of fairly obscure keywords and phrases. Though not usually ideal, one should not entirely discount obscure words and phrases. They can be useful and will be touched upon later. With a 2-3 max in mind, make a short list of what is considered ideal in terms of the business or products being offered. One can always optimize internal pages for additional terms if the homepage cannot support all the most highly prized keywords.
Doing The Homework
Research the chosen keywords. This can be accomplished through a variety of ways. First, and most rudimentary, check them in the search engines. View the listings and get a feel for the competition. Some keywords are more hotly contested than others, though, and this might not be apparent by a mere glance at the results. This is where some deeper analysis is warranted. Various tools exist to gauge the popularity of keywords. Most well known is, perhaps, Wordtracker.com, a keyword analysis tool that requires a monthly fee to use. Many marketers consider its information invaluable, though, providing a good idea of how many people are likely to be searching on a particular keyword or keyphrase. As a general rule of thumb, the more searches, the more competitive it may be. Alternatively the Overture Keyword Selector Tool provides similar information at no charge. Both tools are also useful as suggestion tools, as they will provide a list of related searches that might provide more valuable keywords than were already chosen.
Two Strategies
The data from Wordtracker or Overture, or both, will provide an good idea how much effort will be required to appear in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for a particular keyword or phrase. The more searches, the likely more competitive. More general searches are more common, and these can be the hardest to successfully optimize. This is where more obscure terms and phrases can be useful. Depending on the business or products being sold, some kinds of more obscure phrases can be very useful.
For instance, someone searching on cars could have any number of reasons for doing so. Cars is very popular term, and trying to optimize for it would require a great deal of time and money. Whereas someone searching for a particular type of car, or, better yet, a particular type of car in a certain area, is far more likely to be looking to buy that kind of car. There will also be far fewer people doing that search than for cars, perhaps making it easier to optimize a site or product page for that keyword instead. The traffic from the specific, individual search is also far more highly targeted and far more likely to click through and make a purchase.
It is important not to lose sight of the purpose of the SEO campaign, that of driving potential customers to the businesss website so they will purchase a product or service. Optimizing for very broad, general terms can drive large amounts of traffic if successful, but a far smaller percentage of that traffic is likely to buy. Optimizing for more targeted keywords might not bring as much traffic, but that traffic is more likely to make a purchase. Finding the right balance is important. For some companies, the broad, large amount of traffic may still be preferable and create more sales than the smaller, targeted traffic.
Conclusions
Keyword choice is one of the most important to be made in SEO. What keywords are chosen will determine whether the overall strategy is broad and directed at a large amount of traffic, or small and directed at smaller, more targeted audiences. Each has their merits, though one will generally be more expensive than the other. Always research keywords and know their value before proceeding. Optimizing for poorly chosen keywords is a mistake that takes a lot of time to overcome.
About the Author:
Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, , , and web design services to a wide range of customers.
Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support.
Note: These articles are provided for general interest and content purposes only, and should not be construed as support materials. Apollo Hosting does not guarantee the information contained within. All articles are free to reprint so long as they remain unchanged, the About the Author section remains, all hyperlinks are preserved, and the rel=nofollow tag is not added to the hyperlinks.