Meta Tags - do we? dont we?

[SEOPants]

<meta name="description" content="blah blah">

is placed between the head tags of your webpage. It is used to place a meaningful description of the webpage in the search engine listings.

<meta name="keywords" content="blah blah">

is placed between the head tags of your webpage. It is used to contain keywords about your webpage, and in the past was used to rank the importance of a webpage in the search engine listings.


Depending on who you talk to, you might hear
"Oh meta tags, it’s so old school! You don't need them, they aren't THAT important!"


It's true! Meta tags don't have the same effect on search engine listings today than in the past when were still using notepad and explorer 1.0 to build our websites!


Over time Meta tags have been abused, and search engine robots have gotten smarter. The abuse has come from the spamming of keywords in

<meta name="description" content="this online casino is about an online casino who grew up to be a big strong online casino and came from a long line of online casinos">

<meta name="keywords" content="online casino, casino, online casinos, top casinos, best casinos">

... basically the flooding of the content section with repeated juicy words over and over again).


Google places less emphasis on these 2 Meta tags.

Although abusing the keyword meta tag can potentially penalise your webpage’s listings in the search engines. I should point out, that most search engines ignore the Meta keyword element.


The Meta description element is still used by Google, Yahoo and MSN Live. By placing a Meta description tag in your webpage’s head tags, and having a meaningful description you are ensuring that you don't let the search engines select the text for your webpage when it is listed in the search engine. Definitely helps with the click throughs!



So what should you do?

Use the meta keywords, and meta description tags.
Don't abuse the keywords by flooding it with spammy keywords, and dont use the same keywords from page to page. If your topic is about a particular casino, or a particular slot, use keywords which describe the topic.

Meta Descriptions - use them. Don't let search engines choose the description for your webpage when it gets listed in the engines. You should know your webpage best, and what would make a potential visitor click on a search engine listing.




I would love to hear anyone's experiences regarding keyword and description meta tags, as well as any other meta tags.

[Nandakishore]

Yes, I use only three or four keywords which occur in the content and also a short description which contains some of the key elements of the content.

[Guard Dog]

I definitely use the description and keywords meta tags. The description helps (as you said) with the description searchers see in the different search engines.

I use that to tailor what that page is about so that a searcher see's a proper description. Default descriptions are very bad (i.e., same meta tags for every page).

That's my experience

[Nandakishore]

Yes, I also think that the description is that what a searcher reads, provided he finds the webpage.

I would like to know from Mr. Pants the most important criteria to get good traffic apart from the content. If we are trying to get traffic via search engines, it is SERP that matters. But how do I get a top SERP? Backlinks, Meta tags, descriptions ...?? I am asking this because currently you read everywhere meta tags are no good, backlinks are not always good etc. So, Mr. Pants, please give us state-of-the-art guidelines in this matter.

[SEOPants]

I would like to know from Mr. Pants the most important criteria to get good traffic apart from the content. If we are trying to get traffic via search engines, it is SERP that matters. But how do I get a top SERP? Backlinks, Meta tags, descriptions ...?? I am asking this because currently you read everywhere meta tags are no good, backlinks are not always good etc. So, Mr. Pants, please give us state-of-the-art guidelines in this matter.

In time I'll lay everything out, once I've done a couple more topics, I'll start building a FAQ with everything in it.

To be completley honest, if you are trying to get traffic via the search engines, no one item will get you there.

In my opinon, everything counts.

Back links
Meta tags
Title tags
URL Structure
Webpage Structure
Website Layout
Content
Formatting of site
Size of pages
Colour Scheme
Readibility
[the list goes on.. but we will cover them]

Everything counts in some way. But to varying degrees. Getting traffic from search engines is only half the battle, the second part of the battle is giving users what they want, enhancing the user experience and building that loyalty where the users will want to keep returning to your website.

It's all about good website design.

[sipka]

I use meta tags on each of my pages, keywords are not that important, but description is like a sales message, I think it needs to be well written for the SE clickthrough.

But it can only be valuable if you are able to put different descriptions for each page you have. If you cannot do this, then it is better not to have description/keyword meta tags at all. Duplicate meta tags can hurt. The absence of them not, just your page won't have that plus factor.

[Adrian-LiveCasinoPartners]

I think it's important. It's one more bit of unique content you can place on each page. If it wasn't for met tags, I would probably be using Joomla by now. The dis advantage I had with Joomla and Wordpress is that although plugins are available. Many plugins are not cross compatible. So, I need the flexibility of hard coded html pages via dream weaver.

One thing SEOpants mentioned is page length. I'd like to hear more about the opinions of the ideal page length. It's a tough one i haven't been able to get a definitive answer on.

[bonustreak]

Yes we use them

[Nicolas-Johnson]

Hi,

yes I use 'em, but becareful not to overdue it. Some tags are not necesary, like:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="ALL">

Spiders assume they can take it all, you don't need to tell them that.

	
	
<meta name="rating" content="general">

This is for parent control although the rating "Safe For Kids" does not exist. You may use however "general," "mature," "restricted" and "14 years.". I believe SE's assume your content as "general" even if you don't specify, so for most people it is not necessary

<meta name="distribution" content="GLOBAL">

This is mainly for intra net admistrators who set pages for local or internal use. But for 99% of us this has no use. The content for this tag can be "global," "local" or "iu" (internal Use)