Meta tags

On which pages?

[sickoffusion]

I have a fairly large (130 page) site that has 7 main pages; home, products, services, references and etc.

Each of the seven have:

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="..." NAME="DESCRIPTION">">

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="... " NAME="KEYWORDS">">

<META CONTENT="..." NAME="KEYWORDS">

<META CONTENT="..." NAME="DESCRIPTION">

First question: Comment about using the two META CONTENT tags; Good? Bad?

Second question:

Each of these seven parts, sections, have many pages under them.

Is it necessarily a good or bad idea to have the above Meta tags (with different words) for each of these pages?

[edited by: pageoneresults at 3:01 pm (utc) on Mar. 6, 2005]
[edit reason] Removed Email Address [/edit]

[pageoneresults]

Hello sickoffusion, Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

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

The above topic resides in the Library for this forum which you'll find a link to up above the title of this forum...

Forum Library, Charter, Moderators: pageoneresults & agerhart

The above topic covers the primary metadata that you'll be interested in.

If each of your pages has the above four pieces of metadata, then you need to go through and strip out two of them as they are invalid (the bottom two). Here is the correct syntax for the META Description and META Keywords Tag...

<meta name="description" content="[b]Description here...[/b]">
<meta name="keywords" content="[b]Comma separated keyword list here...[/b]">

[mosaic service]

concentrate more on onpage text optimization rather then hidden text like meta tages etc.

these are not considered by SE. SE gives importance to those visible to visitors and not hidden texts.

[rockoyster]

As a very much learning web develioper I've been browsing through a lot of pages in this forum and have ended up pretty confused about the impact (value) of description and keyword meta tags and how they are treated by search engines.

Can anyone say definitively if they help with seo or not?

Are Dublin Core meta tags of even less benefit than vanilla ones? I followed a link on DC.tags which claimed they were ignored but that was 2001. What about now?

[arrowman]

What do you need metatags for?

[rockoyster]

That's not exactly the sort of "definitive" response I was hoping for.

[dregs33]

Hi

"That's not exactly the sort of "definitive" response I was hoping for."

When a moderator took time out to greet you and offer advice, a comment like this is not called for.

One of the things you will learn from this forum is their is no such thing as a "definitive" answer.

Unless its coming from the horse's mouth, and we do have employees from Google, MSN, Yahoo and Overture posting here.

So please, take the time to search previous posts, as I'm sure that can help you to draw your own conclusion to the importance of meta tags in your situation.

dregs33

[pageoneresults]

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative [webmasterworld.com]

Yes, metadata still play a part in the overall basic SEO of a site. When used properly and on topic with the page, you may find Google showing your META Description "verbatim" if the keyword phrase is right. A well rounded page will most likely have at least a META Description.

[rockoyster]

Thanks pageoneresults. The "Dublin Core" link you provided made mention (post 31 December 2003) of some tests you planned to do to gauge effectiveness of DC. tags.

Did you come to any conclusions? If so I'd greatly appreciate a chance to see what they were.

[pageoneresults]

Did you come to any conclusions?

Unfortunately I did not have the time to create an environment where I could effectively test the use of the DC Metadata. At this point, if you have a website that is targeting any of the entities listed in the Dublin Core Projects, it is suggested that you make use of the appropriate elements for your pages as specified by the Dublin Core.