Is it worth going mad with META tags and slapping in loads of keywords? Do search engines care about META tags nowdays?
Never overload the META tags. Yahoo does use them but, spamming would not be good. IMHO. Other SE's don't seem to use them as much but, taking a moment to do them right can be useful in the long run.
a reasonable amount of meta tags can be useful but I'd limit it definitely not smack up a whole lot of keywords. Most modern engines do not use Meta tags to rank anymore. Sorry the days of that kind of spamming are gone.
META name="keywords", is not important (at least not for me in Google: I'm ranked #1 on Google for a competitive phrase and I'm not using that META). But META name="description" is very important, although not as important as <titlle> Other META can be important too. For example if your site is multi-lingual, your should use META http-equiv="content-language"
That's what real SEO PROs say: Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages Aaron Wall Duplicate content filters are getting tougher. If a site does not have much content and has excessive duplication it not only suppresses rankings, but it may also get many pages thrown in the supplemental results. Ben Pfeiffer I think this question is confusing and needs to be rephrased. Having the same titles and metas on the entire site is not going to inhibit rankings or crawling. The site just doesn't rank as well because its not optimized correctly. Google will try to extract as much information/relevance from the site and rank it according to that. Lucas Ng (aka shor) Having duplicate titles on many pages severely limits the ranking ability of your pages, especially those in the long tail that will not have many inbound links. Those pages compete on internal links and title tag relevance, so its important to have a unique title on each page. Chris Boggs Seems to be the number one way into supplementals, at least for now. Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag Scottie Claiborne Setting words apart from the rest of the text indicates that you think they are important- it makes sense that those words would get a little more attention in the analysis of the page. Ben Pfeiffer Has some weight as a ranking factor, but not very much. Effective usage might lie in what type of tag you use, but its still undetermined. Bolds are for markup, strong is for emphasis. I generally use strong tags and highlight 3-5 keyphrases on a page in slight variations. Jill Whalen I haven't seen real evidence to show this as being a factor. Keyword Use in Meta Keywords Tag Barry Schwartz Only Yahoo and I doubt they use it much. Natasha Robinson Works for mispellings in Yahoo (Ha, I spelled "mispellings" wrong) - And this is about Google. I hope that was good information
The description meta tag gives you the ability in many search engines to control the text that occurs below the blue link on the search engine results page. That to me is very important, since the description text, if good, will earn you a click from the web surfer. If the description text is not good (or is boring or unprofessional), you may lose many clicks even on high-ranking keywords.
Agreed. Many say that the tags aren't used much by search engines, but I disagree. However, definately don't overload them as I believe Google catches on.
i see a lot of my pages with mata tag tthat google show the meta tag under the link to my site- so its very good to tell the visitores to go to my site because my site interesting (i put interesting meta tag)
Ok, So I think i will make some good meta descriptions and not go overboard on the keywords. As it seems like some search engines still use them.
Off-the-page optimization has always been more important than on-the-page optimization. I think most important in on-the-page is keyword research, competitor's site check, proper use of keywords ( max 3-5 ), avoiding stuffing etc, good and quality descriptions etc. Rest is up to off-the-page.
Since SEs improve their "I.Q." and can figure out phrase importance from the page content on their own they tend to degrade META tags importance. And also tend to penalize improper META info.
Yup, things change in SEO land, what works today doesn't work tomorrow so when looking at what the 'experts' say, check when they said it. Algorithms don't stay the same. Nowadays you could get penalized for misspelled keywords in your keywords tag...
The only thing that probably search engine care are those meta tags.SE can only digest a part of a website which are represented briefly in your meta tags.Bots dont know what images so its all texts in that meta tags that bother.Other SEO is for premium rankings but the first step is META TAG
More importantly, are those same keywords in the meta tag also found in the document itself? Meta tags were originally for passing data that actually the SERVER should have been doing, like charset etc. Then people started adding crap like title (the meta title, not the <title>), author, etc. Browsers started to be built to notice them. Now, you pretty much should have a few. Content-type (html), charset, author, desciption, keywords. Jim's got the right idea for desciption meta tags. Summarise your site in a line or maybe two. Though when I'm searching for something, I look at the contextual text the searhc engine displays as having found around the word. That sentence often tells me if that word is in the appropriate context to what I'm looking for. Be careful setting the charset in the meta tags-- they must match what the server is also set to. Server overrides meta! And when they conflict, some people get the funny question marks in place of letters.