SEO and Metatags

January 7, 2007

SEO and Metatags

SEO Myth #3

SEO is all About Metatag Manipulation

In the Golden Years of SEO, one aggressive marketer could stuff their keywords into their page and pretty much dominate.

Changes in algorithms brought on in the name of relevancy and because of more and more pages, caused the engines to get a bit more sophisticated with their formula to rank a website.

In the old days you could put the title tag two or three times down a page along with an abundance of words into your keywords metatag. You could also stuff the alt tag of a picture, to help out your cause.

Today, the major engines (MSN, Yahoo and Google) do read whatever you put onto your page. However, they ignore ranking purposes the keyword tag and alt. Your description tag is mostly used by Google when they want use your description in their SERPS. However, it is not used for positions.

I often see a plethora of tags obviously written to manipulate the spider. Some of the stuff is useful, but stuff like index follow, keyword tag, author, etc will not help. Like I said the only tag that packs a giant punch is the title tag. Everything else runs a distant second, if it matters at all.

Crucials:

w3 declaration
title (make it short and to the point)
encoding
language
description (not for the ranking, so write it as a pitch for a human)
keyword (if you chose to include this for the extremely minimal amount of help it might bring, be sure to include only words used on your page)

A typical set-up that I like in order :

Now, sometimes you have essentials that have to be there. Like in a blog. So be it. But realize that the only noticeably influential tag is the title.

The more you put above the body tag, the more you push your text down the page . And the more you make Mr. Spider work to find your text, the less he likes you.

The Ten Myths of SEO