Forum Moderators: mack
<title>MyDomain.com offering free chess, play chess free online, player ranking and rating, tournament, chess teams, forums, chat rooms, graphical user interface chessboard, game history, pgn chess game export, Multilanguage support in English, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish, analyze board feature, play rated or non rated games and most importantly just have fun</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META NAME="Title" CONTENT="MyDomain.com">
<meta name="description" content="MyDomain.com offers free email chess to users. No subscription fees required. MyDomain.com offers its users free ratings, game history, exportable pgn file for your games, free chess tournaments, free chat rooms, game analysis, free active forums, player online status and much more. Come join us! The site hosts web sites for the California central coast chess clubs. Here you can find information about the Paso Robles Chess Club, the San Luis Obispo Chess Club, 2 dogs chess club,the Morro Bay Chess Clubs and the Cal Poly Chess Club. ">
<meta name="keywords" content="central coast chess, free chess, internet chess, web chess, chess clubs, chess, chess club, paso robles chess, san luis obispo chess, atascadero chess, morro bay chess, arroyo grande chess, california chess, free email chess, free online chess, chess free, chess tournaments, chess ratings, free internet chess, play chess, cheap chess, chess equipment, chess set, chess clock, chessclub, online chess, Grandmaster, ajedrez, schach, play, games, correspondence chess, chess training, chess club, simultaneous exhibition, java, chess master, kriegspiel, chess variant, free, Linares, international, Fischer, chess forum, chess equipment, chess set, chess clock">
<META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="All">
<title>MyDomain.com</title>
No offense, but if I had to pick an example of how not to optimise the meta-data on a page this would be pretty close to it - add two comment tags stuffed with the keywords in uppercase and lowercase and it would read like a list of all of the tricks that use to work a few years ago when AV was king.
I'll let you into a secret - the search engines have already seen keywords stuffed into parts of the page you can't begin to imagine, stuffing keywords into a meta tag gives you no benefit because everyone knows meta tags are spam bait. Either use them properly or not at all because you'll just be wasting your time trying to spam SEs using meta tags.
Basically the system has moved on from relying on users to classify their pages (because of abuse) to the point where the search engines try to work out where each page belongs based on content - making the content work for you could (and probably has) had a load of books devoted to it. An important thing to realise is that you can't design one page and expect it to work well for every keyword you want.
If you're looking for posts about how to rank well using content then I suggest reading a lot of the library material from the Google forum library [webmasterworld.com] and knowledgebase [webmasterworld.com] - lots of good stuff there (like Bretts 12 month guide [webmasterworld.com]). Getting your site doing well in Google is a good place to start because it represents a lot of the search traffic and a lot of the techniques involved will give you a good start in the other engines as well.
Anyhow back to your meta-tags...
Title element
Use a single title tag - preferably the one that best describes the page and not the keyword stuffed one, try to work keywords into it rather than just making a list of them.
Your title will be displayed on the results page so relevancy is good for encouraging users to click through to your site - it also has an effect later on with relation to page content so it's a shame to waste it with pointless stuffing.
Title meta tag
As far as I know this is one of the infinite number of metatags that aren't actually parsed by search engines and so isn't that useful in regards to SEO - I'd say dump unless you're actually using it for something worthwhile.
Description meta tag
If you want to put anything here make it a longer description of the page, and work a few keywords relevant to the current page into it if you feel in the mood - otherwise leave it out.
Keywords meta tag
This tag was so overused by spammers it's basically lost 99.9% of all worth for optimation purposes - heck most of the search engines just ignore it. You can leave it out totally if you want, otherwise just use it in moderation to list keywords relevant to the current page.
Robots meta tag
Nice touch, but every modern crawler treats a page as crawlable unless you tell it otherwise - personally I'd leave it out, but there's no harm in leaving it in.
- Tony
The second example will work a lot better.
The most importaint aspects search engines take into accont are...
On page content and title tag
<title>write a very short description including some keywords</title>
<html>
<head>
<title>title</title>
<meta name = "description" conent= "your description">
<meta name = "keywords" content = "your keywords">
</head>
<body>
page contect
</body>
</html>
Mack.
Sincerely,
Dennis
