Say I have a site in New Hampshire for Underwater Basket weiving

are these key words redundant:

New Hampshire Underwater Basket weiving,
New Hampshire,
Underwater Basket weiving,
New Hampshire Basket weiving,
Basket weiving,
NH Underwater Basket weiving,
NM,
Underwater Basket weiving,
NM Basket weiving,
Basket weiving,

OR, is this correct:
New Hampshire,
NM,
Underwater Basket weiving


Please help

It doesn't make a difference either way. Meta Tags, which is what I am assuming you are talking about, have no real SEO value anymore. So, either way is fine as how they will be used by the few resources out there that use them will use them and interpret them differently and you cannot control that.

Search engines have uses for meta tags. Read the guidelines. The search engine Google doesn't indicate anything contrary to the other search engines.

Nobody uses the Meta Keywords or Description tags in their rankings. That's SEO 101.

Newcomers to Internet marketing should not heed this type of advice.

The search engines explicitly recommend the use of meta tags. Do some research. SEO juniors need to read what the search engines have to say about proper usage of meta tags and why they are important to the search engines, then make up their own minds about if and how to use meta tags.

Suggesting otherwise, is like selling someone a car without any brakes. Yep, the car will run fine until it needs to come to a stop. Why would you want to under-equip a newcomer in SEO. Advanced web site promotion specialists may have sufficient content crafting abilities to alleviate many basic SEO elements, but those types of exceptionally skilled Internet marketers need not come here for SEO tips and advice.

According to the search engines and not the nobodies that stymiee is referring to, it always a good SEO practice to suggest something to the search engines using meta tags which should briefly highlight the unique and pertinent web page content. MSN and Yahoo are very clear about this. Google is a little wishy-washy when it comes to explaining how and why to use meta tags but that is not an indication that they do not gather up information within the meta tags for consideration. Google reads everything and with its thousands of web content filtering mechanisms, meta tags when they are available are undoubtedly factored into rankings.

Now, if you have something to hide or if you are trying to inject a secondary "hidden" agenda ... well then maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea to use meta tags then eh.

Yeah, what Fred said. Consider it SEO 102.

BB

This is the type of advice they need to find more of. The correct kind that is.

They do not recommend it. They say nothing about it. Here's what Google recommends to webmasters. Not a single word on Meta tags can be found. Here are MSN's guidelines. Same thing. You do the research and you'll find that meta tags are not used in the ranking algorithms of the search engines thanks to the abuse of them back in the early days of the search engines. This is so basic it is very scary that you call yourself an SEO expert and then spit out this kind of garbage.

Let me save them some time. Use the Meta Description tag as Google and MSN will use it in the absence of a Dmoz listing for your site or you use the NOOPD Meta tag on your pages. The Meta Keywords tag is only useful for directory and minor (VERY Minor) search engines that still use them because they lack an advanced search algorithm. There, I saved them the effort.

Awful analogy. I'll skip it.

Being new to SEO doesn't make Meta tags suddenly work. So why tell them that? Tell them the truth right from the beginning so they don't waste their time on something that offers them no return for their effort. Something like the effect of incoming links and what makes links different. Ya know, something that actually will affect their rankings.

Wrong. Period. This has been gone over so many times in so many forums and communities that the fact that we have to even debate this is ridiculous. The meta description and meta keywords tags are not used in the search engine algorithms of the major search engines. Only other tags like ROBOTS and NOODP are used and they do not affect a page's rankings in the SERPs.

Want to suggest something to the search engines? Try using good content. (What a concept!)

For those of you who like to use your brain and think things out, chew on this. It should help to make the concept clearer for you. Ranking algorithms are based on content a page provides and its relevancy to a search term. Meta Tags offer nothing to the user and can be easily manipulated with no detrimental affect to the web page. Thus, just like comments in HTML, they are ignored. They have no value in SEO. They have value in other areas of the web, but your rankings in the SERPs of the major search engines is not one of them.

You should establish yourself as knowledgeable in a field before making comments like that.

I did already. What, I have to come round your house and prove myself to your satisfaction before you allow me to post?

BB

Really, don't waste your time arguing with me and stop promoting your garbage techniques. Get to work.

http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html

Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearc...basics-18.html

Add a website description into a Descriptionmeta tag, as shown here:
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Describe your website here" />
http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner...escription.htm