What of Meta Tags?

June 25, 2007 |

I’ve been evaluting meta content more frequently lately, considering the extent to which descriptions are used by engines and whether or not keywors are worth your effort. In recent years both have become less important as black hat SEOs stuff keyword lists and massage descriptions to change that which appears in the SERPs. Yahoo! increasingly relies only on page titles, copy, url structure, and links; Google still seems to value meta content (though insignificantly so). That said, with dozens of new engines available to us every day, meta content remains a critical consideration in SEO to ensure prominently placement everywhere.

Here are a few guidelines for keywords:
1. Always use lowercase letters and comma delimit words and phrases.
2. Limit your META Keywords to around 20 words and phrases or 900 characters.
3. Do not “stuff” your META Keywords. If you still feel that you must repeat keywords, limit it to no more than 3 or 4 times and do not repeat them consecutively. Even then use variations of a keyword: widgets, blue widgets
4. Include product names, series names, category, theme, related or accessory products, and “browse by” keywords; these are the thing that people will search. Don’t waste space with things like SKU or ID number which will get picked up by your page copy for the few searches that occur.
5. Include commonly misspelled words!
6. Consider including keywords and phrases of competing products.
7. Do not use apostrophes because they get stripped. Merge “word’s” to the grammatically incorrect “words”

While we’re on the subject of keywords: Don’t stuff your description with keywords! Your more likely to summon the wrath of the engines and your description should be just that, descriptive.

Search Engine Watch has a nice overview of meta content and Aaron has a great brief on keyword use to help you identify where to use them beyond the meta tags.

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Tags: seo, search

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University Update - Yahoo - What of Meta Tags? on June 25, 20078:56 pm
[…] State University Link to Article yahoo What of Meta Tags? » Posted at SEO’Brien - Search & online marketing […]

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