How important are META tags?

Forum Moderators: mack

Message Too Old, No Replies

How important are META tags?

Aberdeen

11:38 am on Oct 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

I was under the impression google did not look at them and so did not pay much attention to them. Does the order of the meta tags make a difference, and should you always have a description?

RonPK

1:49 pm on Oct 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

No one knows for sure how important meta-keywords and meta-description are for PageRank, but most think they are totally irrelevant. Google sometimes uses meta-description for the page description snippet on the SERP, so you'd better have one.

AFAIK the order is not important.

Also, keep in mind that there are other SE's, that do use the meta-keywords.

Mark_A

1:55 pm on Oct 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hi Aberdeen, while I think it is true that they are not anymore very important for google they are used by other engines so its not a bad idea to include contents and keyword metatags.

You could add popular mispellings to the keywords meta tag rather than in the page and see what happens :-)

takagi

1:55 pm on Oct 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

No one knows for sure how important meta-keywords and meta-description are for PageRank, but most think they are totally irrelevant.

As for PageRank, meta-keywords and meta-descriptions are VERY unlikely to have any influence. As for ranking in the SERPs, it could help for searches on Google to have a meta-description. It won't hurt to have meta-keywords, but most major search engines will ignore them.

tedster

4:50 pm on Oct 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

Just so things are very clear for people who are learning about these issues, let me be particular about the use of the word "PageRank".

PageRank is only part of the Google algo - it's the part dictated by the now famous 1997 paper, Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [www-db.stanford.edu] from Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

And everyone's comments here are true -- PageRank definitely does not look at meta-tags. In fact, PageRank has nothing to do with words or content in any fashion, it just looks at links.

For the sake of clear communications, I think it's important to use the word "PageRank" (PR for short) precisely, and not just to mean "Google's Ranking" on a search.

Google's results today depend on many factors in addition to PageRank - but meta tags still don't mean much in that part of the Google alogrithm either, as noted by the folks in this thread.

RonPK

5:56 pm on Oct 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

Thanks for correcting me, Tedster. I did indeed confuse PageRank with ranking on the result pages. Mea culpa.

Nick_W

5:59 pm on Oct 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

Personally I wouldn't go anywhere near a damn meta tag other than description and charset....

Waste of time and space...

Nick

amznVibe

6:50 am on Oct 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

Some meta data is useful, or at least finding a new use. GeoUrl's for example can be handy for folks to discover your site if locality has some meaning to your site/service/product.

also see here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

tbear

11:29 pm on Oct 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

I get about 60% of my traffic from G the other 40 comes from all kinds of diverse sources, many of which ddo indeed use meta data........
I always put (apart from charset) description, content and keywords. Related to each page of course and not filled to the hilt, just relevant stuff.

g1smd

11:43 pm on Oct 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

Make sure you do all of this (copied from a msg posted in the forum a few weeks back):

Your document should begin with a !DOCTYPE (tells the browser what sort of HTML is in the file) and a title element:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title> Your Title Here </title>

For your page to actually be valid you MUST declare the character encoding (lets the browser know whether to use A to Z letters (latin), or Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Arabic script, or some other character set) used for the page, with something like:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

There are also other schemes such as UTF-8 and many others.

It is also a good idea to declare what language the page is in, using:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="EN-GB">

The language and country codes come from ISO 4217 and ISO 3166. This is useful for online translation tools as well. Change the "en" and "gb" to whatever language and country you need.

You need the meta description tag, and it is useful but not vital to have a meta keywords tag:

The last parts of your header should have your links to external style sheets and external javascript files:

Use this if the stylesheet is for all browsers:

<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" src="/path/file.css">

Use this for style sheet that you want to hide from older browsers, as older browsers often crash on seeing CSS:

Use this for the javascript:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/path/file.js"></script>

End the header with this:

</head>
<body>

and then continue with the body page code.

It is as simple as that.

Code within the page:

I use: <a href="somepage.html" title="some text here"></a> for links.

I use <img src="somefile.png" alt="some text"> for images.

Headings are done with <hx></hx> tags, properly used from <h1></h1> downwards.