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Metas still worth the hassle?

natty

4:18 pm on Feb 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

hi all,

im sure this question comes up alot, buit i couldnt find an up to date post to be sure of..

i have a site which i guess primarily is to sell a cd with various artists on it. i had not bothered with meta tags at all on the site, until i was threatened with not getting paid because of this.
i was under the impression that metas did not carry much weight with SE's nowdays, and am wanting to swerve this bit of (extra pointless?) work and still get paid.
client obviously wants to be high up the searches. but will putting the description/title/keywords in actually make a difference?

i think also i consider meta tags to be apart from the usual site building..
i know that the text in the content is usually paramount, and the actual name/title of the page holds more sway..
am i barking up the wrong tree?

i guess i am really after a definative answer so i can tell this rather annoying client(for many other reasons he is this) where to put his meta tags.
in the nicest possible way ofc..

tia

nathan

pageoneresults

4:28 pm on Feb 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

I would utilize at least the META Description Tag. Yahoo! now claims that it indexes the META Keywords Tag so it may not be a bad idea to utilize that too. I wouldn't worry about the keywords as much as the description. It takes about a minute or two to craft both, I always try to make use of at least the META Description Tag.

natty

4:36 pm on Feb 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

hi pageoneresults,

thanks for the speedy reply.
i dont suppose you have a link to somewhere that will help me generate said tags, or a explanation of helpful rules to follow when making them?
i have found a couple of generators, but i dont like to rely on something like that.

thanks again

nat

pageoneresults

5:05 pm on Feb 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

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Building the Perfect Page - Part I - The Basics [webmasterworld.com]
Building the Perfect Page - Part II - The Basics [webmasterworld.com]
Building the Perfect Page - Part III - The Basics [webmasterworld.com]

Try the above topics first. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them and I'm sure the members here will gladly provide you with answers to those questions.

No need to use a META Tags Generator. You'll have one <title> element and two META Tags you'll be working with and it is just a matter of cutting and pasting...

<head>
<title>Insert Page Title Here</title>
<meta name="description" content="Insert a well written description here.">
<meta name="keywords" content="Insert a comma separated list of keywords and keyword phrases here.">
</head>

keywordguru

6:34 pm on Feb 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I would stress that you should at least use 1 fully completed meta tag for all pages. I find that different search engines still rely on them and I sometimes get ranked for a term within.

The odd thing is that I have actually even seen google refer to it in some testing instances when it is said that google ignores them completely. So my theory is that it doesn't rely on them, but will still consider them somewhere along their tied and twisted algorithm.
KG