How important are keywords/description meta tags today (as opposed to in previous years)? I understand that Google doesn't utilize them anymore. Do other search engines?
Dani 4,351 The Queen of DaniWeb Administrator Featured Poster Premium Member
jayant 36 Junior Poster in Training
biggies dont care.
some smaller ones do.
Zachery 43 The Geek Father Team Colleague
yes dani, goggle really does need them
/me points to adsense
it helps to determin the content of the adsense ad's belive it or not.
Dani 4,351 The Queen of DaniWeb Administrator Featured Poster Premium Member
I'm not concerned really with AdSense - most of my AdSense ads are relevant. I'm more concerned with SEO (search engine optimization) for placement in search results.
Zachery 43 The Geek Father Team Colleague
i would leave them there :)
Gary King 37 PHP/vBulletin Guru Team Colleague
If they exist, then leave them. Otherwise, I don't think you should bother too much about them.
samaru 145 a.k.a inscissor Team Colleague
I haven't seen a successful web site without them, so I highly recommend them. As long as you don't have a megabyte of pure metatags it should be ok. Company sometimes abuse the heck out of them and spiders don't even bother to crawl them because they see the abuse.
Gary King 37 PHP/vBulletin Guru Team Colleague
I haven't seen a successful web site without them, so I highly recommend them. As long as you don't have a megabyte of pure metatags it should be ok. Company sometimes abuse the heck out of them and spiders don't even bother to crawl them because they see the abuse.
You get moved down if your keywords are way too generalized (like this website having keywords such as "computers,tech,animals,food,pie,simpsons" you get the point :p
samaru 145 a.k.a inscissor Team Colleague
Every successful site that I've seen has used general keywords one time or another. In the long run, I don't recommend you ignoring generalized keywords.
Ragnarok 0 Junior Poster in Training
Personally I put them on, for a few moments work you get 100s of smaller searchengines able to search your site
ajax-the-techie 0 Light Poster
Yes, meta tags are very important for a site. The place where people mess up most frequently is in the content of the site and the keywords tag. Basically, find words in your site's content that appear frequently, pertain to the subject of your site, and make for decient keywords. Use those in the meta tag for keywords and Google will bless you for it.
Bear in mind that this may not be the case for all search engine's, but we all know the importance of Google PR, now don't we? :D
carolblake1973 0 Newbie Poster
Meta-tags don't appear to be a big concern with Google but Yahoo and MSN and other Ink based spiders like them. Always worth using them as a basic SEO policy.
I, Brian 0 Light Poster
Meta-tags are not of great concern nowadays for SEO purposes. HOWEVER, on saying that, there is still some real value to their use for Inktomi-based systems, such as MSN and Yahoo.
If you want to see whether any search engine uses meta-tags for direct ranking purposes, then you can test this here:
http://www.seo-lab.com/seo-lab-tests/meta-tags/
ajax-the-techie 0 Light Poster
Once again, I will say, they are also important for the all-knowing, all-seeing Google. Not in the tag itself, but in that Google uses it as a way of looking to see if your claims on a meta tag are realevant to the site. They use the words in the keywords tag to search the site and see if that's really what you content is based on. Check to see if it's a valid site for those keywords...if it is, they use it. Smart if you ask me.
ap09.com 0 Junior Poster in Training
Google stopped meta tags in SEO. I think Bing is using meta tags.
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