I am working on SEO for my website. While looking for information and tips, I ran across this post: http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/b...arch-ranking-using-thematic-search-modifiers/ It is talking about organic search rankings. It seems to imply that, by using modifiers in the body of my content, I can increase the relevance and essentially "stuff" my content without actually cramming a bunch of keywords into the text. This sounds great. The post, however, seems to imply that using a meta description will negate this. Is this a good technique to use? Am I misunderstanding the author? Will this work with the meta desc in place? Are the benefits greater than the cost of removing the tag?
Good question, using meta tags is confusing and can present obstacles than prevent webmaster from getting less than desirable results when attempting to target keywords and get first page search engine placement. Meta tags are on my top 10 list of important factors of SEO, but I do not feel that the play as much of a roll compared to other important factors. When meta tags are used properly that can help give a website an edge over other websites that are competing for the same keywords and/or keyword phrases. I have personally been experimenting with meta tags on many different websites for well over 4 years of the 6 years that I have spent thus far learning search engine optimization. I have found that meta tags are not needed to get good placement for keywords that are selected for targeting, but if you do use them, and you are not sure of how to use them properly, you may get results that are less than desirable. Meta Tags added to a website many different ways, and many different webmasters and SEO experts have different idea about how to use them (or not to use them) to optimize a website. You could talk to 100 SEO Experts about what the best way to use meta tags is, and you may get 99 different answers. The way meta tags are used is very important when they are used, but I have designed a few websites without meta tags, and I was surprised to find my websites was top 10 at Google, Yahoo, and MSN for the search phrase: cPanel Web Hosting (in one case) and the other site had the terms like the following term, including the following term: publish ads In fact these sites should still be ranked at least Top 10 - in 2 out of the 3 major search engines. (Along with hundreds of other very relevant keyword phrases from other websites that I have optimized.) - Below is some basic information about meta tags - When using meta tags for SEO, they should start right under your title tag: <title> </title> When selecting keywords, do not define too many keywords for any single page. Try to spread out the keywords and keyword phrases to be optimized on different pages. Keyword Stuffing can lead to a page be view as not relevant, this will lead to poor organic keyword performance. Remember to use keywords from and keywords phrases in your title tag and do try to define too many keyword for any (1) one web page, spread them out throughout the website. Here is a link to more information on this topic that I posted recently here at Digital Point. Top 10 List of Important SEO Factors If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, feel free to post them.
It's a decent article... some decent advice. However, I disagree somewhat with this parargraph: I'm guessing this is what your are refering to... I think it is VERY important to have good <meta name="description"> elements on every page. While they are not used at all by Google to rank your URL, having a good <meta name="description"> can greatly affect your click-thru-rate. A well written <meta name="description"> will tell the user what that can expect if they click on your link in the SERPs. A well written <meta name="description"> will also make them WANT to click on your link. I always keep my <meta name="description"> under 150 characters. Google historically has truncated anything after that... I think Yahoo! truncates around 145. But now, Google is actually showing 300-400 characters from your <meta name="description"> if the person searched on a really long tail term like a keyword phrase composed of 6 or 7 keywords. I also try to make sure all of my <meta name="description"> elements have a call to action to entice the user the person to click on the link. I try to start them with verbs like "Learn about...", "Find...", "Buy...", etc. and most importantly, I try to work every keyword from the <title> element into the <meta name="description">. If you've done your job well as an SEO the keyword phrases from the <title> and slight variations of those based on common modifiers will be the search phrases users are most often using to find that page in the SERPs. I'll explain why using the keywords from your <title> in your <meta name="description"> element is important. Just because you have a <meta name="description"> element in your HTML does NOT mean that Google is automatically going to show it as the snippet in the SERPs as the article seems to imply. My experience on how Google decides what to show for the snippet in the SERPs for a given URL is as follows: 1) Google first looks to DMOZ to see if your URL has an entry there. If it does then they typically use the DMOZ description. I think their logic is that it is a human written (supposedly unbiased) description of the topic of your page. Of course, you can prevent them from using the DMOZ description if one exists by including a <meta name="robots" content="noodp"> element in your page's HTML. 2) Next if they don't find a DMOZ description (or if you block usage of DMOZ description using NOODP), Google looks to your <meta name="description"> element as a possible choice. What seems to determine whether or not they use it is whether your <meta name="description"> element contains all of the keywords in the user's search phrase. So if the person searched for the keyword phrase "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3", if all 3 keywords from the keyword phrase appear in the <meta name="description"> then Google will shows the contents of your <meta name="description"> as the snippet. 3) If your URL does not have a DMOZ entry AND all of the keywords from the search phrase do not exist in <meta name="description"> it is then that Google constructs a snippet. They seem to typically grab a sentence fragment from the first occurance of each keyword in the <body> of source HTML and peice it together to make the snippet. I think the logic behind their approach to snippets for #2 and #3 above is based on the fact that they want to show a snippet that contains ALL of the keywords in the search phrase so that they can highlight all of the searched keywords in the snippet. IMO having them construct a snippet leaves a lot to chance. You have no clue which sentence fragments will end up being pieced together for a particular phrase other than it appears, in most cases, to me to be the first occurence in the HTML. Sometimes they do a nice job, sometimes it looks crappy. I would much rather have my <meta name="description"> shown because it's constructed by me to market my page a particular way. But to each his own...
I think it is important from a visitor point of view as it is the first impression of your site they will see in a search result - so make them interesting!
Yes, If you accurately describe your web page in the Meta description, Google is most likely to use it as the snippet and for searches to click it is very influential.
What you place in you Titlt and Description is very important for what is placed in the SERPs. A page with a description will rank higher than a blank description.
Here's a decent video Cutts did about a year and a half ago regarding snippets: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/video-anatomy-of-a-search-snippet/ As catanich said, it's very important to include a <meta name="description"> element on every page because some search engines still use it in their ranking algorithms. Google, however, has stated publicly on numerous occasions that they do NOT use the <meta name="keywords"> and <meta name="description"> elements in their ranking algorithm. I must have heard Cutts say this at least 50 times in hallway, back of class, and "Meet the Google Engineers" discussions during the last couple of Pubcons in Vegas. Here is another example where Raj Krishnan then from Google's Snippet Team talks about <meta name="description"> elements and their importance. Note the last sentence in the 2nd paragraph: Having a well written <meta name="description"> element would likely increase your click-thru-rate... So from that perspective, if Google considers click-thru-rate in their organic ranking algorithm then the <meta name="description"> could indirectly affect your rankings even at Google. I've never seen a definitive answer or statement from Google regarding using click-thru-rate in their ranking algorithm, but I've suspected for a while that they might. I've often thought this might be one reason for the "Google honeymoon" period when newly indexed pages/sites are shown on page 1 of the SERPs for a few days or even weeks even though they are new and have no inbound links from external sites. If click-thru-rate does figure into their ranking equation the only way to get a fairly accurate initial value for this ranking factor would be for it to show on page 1 for some period of time... thus the honeymoon. But who knows...
Based on my personal experiences, I consider META Description important although it may weigh very low in SE algo but you need to make your content human readable as well. So, it is better to use this craft.
Yes Meta tags are very very important and two most important ones are Description and Keywords meta tags Some info about Description Meta tag <META name="description" content="Short and descriptive description about the site."> The description tag gives the search engine the description about the contents of your web site. If you don't have description tag, the robots will simply choose the first couple hundred words on your page and create its own description. You can include your main keyword here but should not repeat the same. It should describe a brief of page contents and it is visible in search results. The maximum length of characters shall be used are not more than 255. You should write this carefully and write for humans, as it display in search results and going to convince the searcher about clicking on your site. Thanks,
I would say that meta tag descriptions can be useful as a means of informing the search engines the basic content of your site - and allow the search engines to create an inviting relevant summary of your site to attract visitors in the final step to your website I have seen sites with no meta tags get a good summary and yet seen some pretty generic and non inviting sites in the same manner with sites that have no meta tag description Its best to play it safe