is the density of the meta tags important? example: is this A - <meta name="description" content="very important keyword, very important keyword" /> <meta name="keywords" content="very important keyword, very important keyword" /> Code (markup): better than B - <meta name="description" content="very important keyword, very important keyword less important keyword" /> <meta name="keywords" content="very important keyword, very important keyword, less important keyword" /> Code (markup): ?? now you are probably thinking. why the hell would you want the "less important keyword" to be there? well lets say that that keyword is "globally" usefull to the full website while the "very important keyword" is specific to that specific page (i have a "details" page) example: very important keyword - "rambo 3" - details page of rambo 3 less important keyword - "Sylvester Stallone" - important globally so is it better to have in the details page for "rambo 3" with meta tags like: A - <meta name="description" content="rambo 3" /> <meta name="keywords" content="rambo 3" /> Code (markup): or B - <meta name="description" content="rambo 3 Sylvester Stallone" /> <meta name="keywords" content="rambo 3, Sylvester Stallone" /> Code (markup):
I personally would go for B. Others may disagree, I am not sure why. If someone is interested in Rambo 3 you can safely assume that they will not be turned off by a page containing information about Sylvester Stallone unless there is nothing Rambo 3 related on that page.
I use method B with all my sites. I may be mistaken, but I feel it helps me reach the long tail of searchers. I don't have any hard, definative evidence that I'm right, but I frequently see keyword listings in my analytics screen that seem to be related to the less important keywords.
I also use method B, but I wonder how important meta tags are these days. I don't think it would make a huge difference which one you chose.
The META keywords tag is practically ignored by search engines and is best treated as a reminder to yourself as to what keywords you're targeting. However, the META description tag is still used by search engines to describe what the page is about (and only that).
I wonder if it even has a slight affect on search engines. I once change my keywords a bit and in a matter of hours my sites position changed. I then changed them back and it was back to its original position. This might coincidence, but I think that meta tags must carry some weight. However, they probably carry a very minor weight.
ok - thanks. i think i'll go for B too. interesting ... so in the HEAD tag the title means a LOT ... but META keywords and description don't mean that much. am i getting it correctly?
The keyword density IS important. But having the meta description as only Rambo 3 will limit your search results only to Rambo 3, while adding also Sylvester Stallone will give you results also for Sylvester Stallone. What you might want to pay attention is the stop words (i.e. and, or, this, that etc).
No, the content on the page is what matters. As I've said, META keywords are all but useless these days because some morons, crackpots and all around jerks decided to manipulate the search engines to the point where the originally handy (and very useful) feature was all but ignored. As for the META description, its only use these days is to provide a description of the Web page for search engine results.
The META Keywords tag is really a thing of the past, and is no longer relevant by the search engines. The only META tags you need to really concern yourself with is the description tag like Dan had pointed out and in some cases even the robots tag are still used for certain pages. Other then do no focus on your keywords tag and the density, instead focus on the content on the page itself. Steve
And in most of those cases, the same job can be done with a robots.txt file. There are two other META tags I do use though, one is to strip any potential DMOZ entries from Google's SERPS and the other is to prevent the image toolbar in Internet Explorer from popping up. Though I am seriously thinking about adding the author and copyright ones just to tweak the noses of content scrapers.
So long as the content in your Meta's is also contained on your page, if not it can be seen as a gaming attempt. Also make sure it doesnt take your keyword density to a spammy level. They dont help alot but can cause problems if you get things wrong.
Me too I vote for B. But try to be more descriptive in your description. Your sample description looks meta keywords.
First off i was referring to the meta description and not the meta keywords. Second, what you are saying about the meta description is untrue and i can prove you that search engines DO use meta description when we perform a search query.
I was replying to multiple posts at the same time. Excuse me for not using the multi-quote feature. As for the meta description not being all but useless (other than to provide a description of the page), if you wish to try and prove otherwise, you're more than entitled to. Whether you actually can is another matter entirely.
It means people like what you said on the forums so far. Everyone starts with one green bar, and when you get 100 "rep" you get a second one. However, you can get a "red rep" (as in a bad reputation) if you specifically go out of your way to make peoples' lives miserable, intentionally provide misleading and false information (like "Flipper loves dolphin with his tuna fish") and so on and so forth.
Sure thing i can and i am willing to do that with more than just one example. First example down lower you will see a site hs-hosting.net which has the keywords Cheap Web Hosting in the title and in the description ONLY. Now pay attention on the bolder text which indicates the keywords and than check the meta description of the site. Second example (i am not sure if thats the page of the SERPs google will display for you, anyway) the site is dnseo.net (the one in my signature). The SEO Optimization keywords can be found in the title, in the meta description and in the body text as well, but, take a look at the bolder text and confront that with the meta description, does the text match? I hope this was enough to close the discussion about the meta description if useless or not, tho if you are not satisfied no worries, i can digg deeper and find you more info. Btw, i respect you and i know you have some valuable and sensed posts here on DP but i just had to get on the defense of meta description tag, because it works. Hope we will have more talk in the feature Dan.
I vote: neither. Your meta description should be an actual sentence (or perhaps two short ones): something a human is expected to read and click on. It should have a few of your keywords, but not a list. As for the keywords tag - danny sullivan recently did a summary of it's use and the conclusion was: don't bother and certainly don't fret over it.