Here goes the first of what I hope is many posts on this forum... I have just started my new site www.defending.com, and I decided to have 30 tags per post. On another forum I was told that this is bad for SEO, and so I cut it down to 20 tags, but am concerned that this too many. I would be interested in comments on my use of tags, or any other aspect of the way that my site is set up in terms of SEO. Thanks for taking the time to check my post out.
Meta tags don't really affect your page rank anymore. They used to be a huge thing, but people decided to overuse it and now it's the backlinks that are the most important to your website. If you want to read more about getting your page ranked higher, visit a Google Search Quality Group team member at http://www.mattcutts.com, you'll find useful information.
errr, me thinks that isnt quite right.....keyword tags are disregarded largely, but title and description tags are hugely relevant, and serious thought and consideration should be taken in deciding them.
thanks I took the tag cloud off the front page and that reduces the URLs on page to below 100, which I think is important for SEs. in future posts I will use less tags
your site has very poor title and description tags. and these will be crucial to how well your site gets indexed by google, and not only that, you need to apprecaite that google will display a snippet taken from your title or description tags as the text to show when you appear on the natural listings. they need to be grammatically sound, make sense to someone quickly browsing googles results pages, and also contain your main keywords. Place your primary keyword, or phrase, at the beginning of each title tag. Then use same or similar semantics in your description, but you can 'loosen up' a little in the description tag because generally you can use more characters than the Title tag. For example, your 'About Us' page has 'About | defending.com' as the Title tag. Far better might be 'defending a criminal charge | how to defend criminal charges' This includes the keywords far better, and also reflects what a browser who wants to find out how to defend him/herself against a criminal chrage might put in google as a search string. You can see hopefully from this example, how you should be framing each of your pages. You then need to make sure that you have your keywords sprinkled throughout the page, and try to have it at the very beginning and also the very end. Use h1, h2 tags in your HTMl to show google which text to concentrate on, and use bold and italic to highlight keywords. create a HTML site map for your visitors, and an XML Site Map for google. then submit to google for verification. Place Google anlalytics on all your pages so you can begin monitoring visitor numbers and behaviour, and then sit back and have a coffee while you see what transpires...lol. There, a crash course in on-page optimization.
yes, as per my view that so many tags are dangerous for search engine optimization, because it's considering spam as per search engines algoritham.
Thanks all. Especially Cris.Stevo. I changed my blog title from defending.com to "Defending your rights in the criminal justice system" which improved all my title tags. Following this I changed the description tags in the way described by Cris. I also reduced every post to just six tags. Now the only issue I am worried about is low keyword relevancy on my homepage as a result of using a magazine theme, which I am discussing in this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1471920
one thing i have noticed is that all the organic searches I am getting for these early days of my site are coming from the long tail tags that i have now deleted - so all my visitors are getting to redirects! maybe tag stuffing isnt such a bad thing? or maybe in the early days I should focus on six obscure lontail tags per page. I think that latter idea could be a winner?
I have a few sites that have 40 plus tags and have not seen any evidence that it hurts or helps. I usually keep it around a dozen. I still think what is more important is how you use your keywords in your title. It is worth the time to see if your can combine a few keywords into your title and one that makes sense. This is where I have seen good results.
I suggest you don't abuse with tags, 5 for a post is enought, especcialy if you have few post on your blog. More tag means more duplicate page on your blog, and that is no good for search engine!
Google and other search engines sometimes use your description tag as the text that comes up on your result. You can optimize this, but you want to optimize for humans. Put in something that will grab their interest and make them click, but don't try stuffing it with keywords because that won't work. And yes keyword tags are largely ignored by nearly every search engine these days. It's a waste of time to even bother with them.
Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Didn't think of it that way. I only use 1 or 2 tags per post, just all depends on how I'm feeling that day...lmao!
It's not a waste of time to use keyword tags, although many people will tell you this. It requires such minimal effort that you really should do it because there is some benefit. That said, having too many tags is said to be negative and spammy, but I've never really seen a difference between including few or many.
for me its not bad to use keywords tags or tag clouds, google like pages the more pages they crawl the better...but as it always say to much is bad.
too much of anything is bad! search engines also apply this to your website and you could be penalized by keyword stuffing, usually I creates only 3 tags every blog post using a different pages and keywords of my site because having many tags with the same link is the same as having only one tag with link plus the risk of getting penalized by google.