So how important are the meta tags for being crawled. Also what are some important meta tags besides title, keywords, and descirption?
It's generally accepted that meta tags have little or no effect on rankings and definately dont help you get crawled. I put in keywords and description and remove all the rest to help keep the file size as low as possible.
The title tag isn't actually a meta tag. And it is VERY important. Keywords and descriptions less so. Descriptions are best used to provide nice catchy descriptions for your site, as they can often be used to describe your site in the results pages. I wasn't aware that Yahoo or MSN took meta keywords into account?
What would be a guidline as far as how many keywords one can have, and how long can the description text be? I realize as it would be on my webpage, I could use any length I choose, but what is the longest that search engines like to see. Dan
Does anyone have an example of a good description or keyword meta tag? I would love to see some examples so that I can make sure I am doing them right.
Just have a look in teh google results and when you like a description that you see there, you will know that it is a good one. As for keywords, just fill it up with whatever you think is ok in a comma seperated format. Btw, the FIRST thing you should be doing is changing the titles of your pages. I doubt that you want to rank well for "OsCommerce".
The only figures i have for meta content and title tag length are from Overture during an extended email exchnage over a penalised site: "Your page title should ideally be no longer than 70 characters including spaces. META descriptions should be no longer than 150 characters including spaces. And your META keywords tag should include 10-15 words maximum; avoid repeating keywords as it can be regarded as SPAM. " schlottke: do you have any examples of sites ranking on misspellings due to meta data? i would be interested to see...
Your best bet is to just check out a few sites and do a "view source" in your browser. I usually try to follow a couple of rules with meta tags. One, only use the one's you need. Two, never EVER repeat a word in your keywords meta tag. In fact, you might just want to leave it blank, or just put you top 10 keywords and leave it at that. As far as getting crawled goes, Sometimes I like to put the "robots" tag in with an "index,follow" command in it just to make sure the bot gets the message. Don't know if it helps, but it can't hurt! Take a look at the tags in the first site in my sig. Just look at the tags between the one near the top that says "charset=iso-8859-1". For eveything between that one and the title this is true: If you don't know what it is, you probably don't need it.
Not only mispellings can you be found for, but also words ran together such as "digitalpointforum" A lot of people don't bother adding spaces between the words, so I try to scatter some of these mistakes in my pages and meta tags on purpose, just in case. Sometimes I'm amazed on the mispelled words my pages are found for. I use to go and correct them immediately! But then I thought, "Why?" If you have a "stats" program, look for the keywords that people are finding you with, and add them to the Meta Tags. Another thing is that Google has used my Metas, when the keywords couldn't be found on my page. Hope this helps.
Title tags are very important in on page optimisation. You should avoid too nmany keywords though. Generally we do our page titles in this format Site Name | Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3 Then you need to have the keywords liberally sprinkled in the first 100 words of your content, and in your H-tags
Meta tags are very important part of SEO. Google's algorithms change constantly and at this time keyword meta tags have loss favor in SERP. It seems that Google is putting a lot of SERP rank weight in the title meta tags. Make sure the keywords you are targeting is in the title metatag. The Description Metatag is shown in the listing so it will draw in the visitor. Google frowns on keyword stuffing and yahoo rewards for it. Yahoo still uses and recommends using the keyword metatag. You should use the metatags to best describe you contents keywords. Regards
meta tags are used for your site description, it allows the spider to know what kind of niche your site belongs....and also it is the first one to appear on SE results , meta description, keywords and title, for meta title the can have this or not because of the <title> tag, it will be redundant.......