hidden keywords, can they been viewed somehow?

[AffiliateDreamer]

Hi,

I pass by some fairly highly ranked websites to find no meta tags etc in the html. I'm assuming the meta tags are being hidden. Is there a way to view them? I'm guessing I have to somehow fool the server into thinking i'm a SE?

[bufferzone]

It’s much more simple then that, META simply doesn’t work anymore. Google and most other major SE’ doesn’t take meta into account when ranking pages. META hasn’t been hot for many years now. If you don’t find any keywords in meta, it just mean that the page you are looking at, has been properly optimized.

[sem4u]

Meta tags don't have much weight in the ranking process anymore. However, Yahoo! and Google still read them and may place a small amount of emphasis on them.

[goodroi]

Metatags do have some value but it has decreased so much that many SEO people no longer bother with them. Just to make sure that the site is not cloaking their metatags or more importantly anything else you should check to see if you can view the cache in the Google serps.

[coldclimber]

Hi am a bit of a novice at this but this thread intersted me due to the fact that meta tegs were not being used within searches so how do you place key words then. is it just the content of the page they are looking at?

[quickcat]

I do not believe meta tags are entirely useless. I have seen sites whose rank increase with the addition of unique title and description meta tags the only change.

Certainly there are content-rich sites with no meta tags with high ranking, but all things being equal, an accurate unique title tag for each page can help.

[Robert Charlton]

I have seen sites whose rank increase with the addition of unique title and description meta tags the only change.

The title tag is an extremely important optimizing element. While it's often grouped with the meta tags, I believe it's technically not a meta tag. Those who dismiss meta tags are talking mainly about the meta keywords tag, and to a lesser extent about the meta description. Again, the title is important.

The meta keywords tag was declared dead long ago, but it persists in the folklore and in occasional statements by the engines. It's too late at night to go into the history of this tag. Let's say, though, that if the engines look at something like 100 factors in ranking a page, the meta keywords tag is probably somewhere around 110th in importance.

...so how do you place key words then. is it just the content of the page they are looking at?

To greatly oversimplify... all of the algos reward content that is visible and prominent, in the content of the page, in the page title, and in inbound link anchors. Make it too prominent and you might be too obviously manipulating. Agonize and depend on stuff like meta keywords tags and alt tags and you're wasting your time.

See this discussion, and read from roughly WebGuerrilla's post, msg#49, through the bottom of this page...

Make intelligent use of META tags - Part 1
[webmasterworld.com...]