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I have just build a fairly large site (165 pages) and now I have the daunting task (due to the number of pages) of adding the meta tags.
Question is, do I need to insert the meta tags (particularly Keywords) on every page of the site, or can I just include them on the home page with the "robots" tag <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> and spiders will just automatically follow all links?
Appreciate all guidance.
Neophyte
The only use for <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> might be in conjunction with the "nocache,nosnippet,noodp" values.
The Title element and the Description meta tag are far more important than the Keywords meta tag, which is practically deprecated due to past abuse. Make sure your title and description are attractive, accurate, and unique for each page, and contain your most important keyphrase(s) for that page. Include a call to action in your description.
The importance of a unique title and description cannot be overemphasized: For more information, do a search here for "Supplemental results title description unique" or similar.
The task may indeed be daunting, but given a choice, I'd rather have very thin pages with outstanding titles and descriptions, instead of great content with bad titles and descriptions. Actally, I'd rather have outstanding titles, descriptions, and great content... :)
Jim
Thanks so much for your input. Facinating (to me) - particulary about the "keywords" tag.
Greatly appreciate your input.
Neophyte
Meta Tags on Home Page only?
neophyte - Apart from the issue of meta tags, which Jim Morgan covers, your question suggests perhaps a misunderstanding about how you optimize a site....
The unit of optimization is a page, not a site, and optimizing is all about page focus. Therefore you're not targeting everything on the site on your home page.
So your targeting elements... metas, titles, headings, text content, whatever... should relate to each page, not to the site overall. The home page is the page that generally gets the most inbound links, and is a good place to target your most competitive phrases, but not all of them.
This is an oversimplification, but for now should get you started.
Your explanation was very helpful. Yes, you're right... I have a huge misunderstanding of SEM and pretty much all related areas. Now I know that I've got to put some serious time into learning atleast the basic ins-and-outs of same.
Appreciate your input.
Neophyte
