Meta tags - is title, description, & keywords sufficient?

Hi guys.

Just a quick question. I was looking at the source code of some of our competitors and noticed this in their meta data:

<meta name="RESOURCE-TYPE" content="document" />
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" />
<meta name="REVISIT-AFTER" content="7 days" />
<meta name="CLASSIFICATION" content="Accommodation" />
<meta name="DISTRIBUTION" content="Global" />
<meta name="RATING" content="General" />


My question is what does this do, and how important is it in terms of SEO? Thanks!

 

meta tags helps search engine spider to navigate your page it is a command read by robots in order to navigate your page.

 

<meta name="RESOURCE-TYPE" content="document" /> --> Not Needed
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" /> --> Useless
<meta name="REVISIT-AFTER" content="7 days" /> --> Useless
<meta name="CLASSIFICATION" content="Accommodation" /> --> Not Needed
<meta name="DISTRIBUTION" content="Global" /> --> Not Needed
<meta name="RATING" content="General" /> --> Not Needed

The only ones I would include is your Title Tag for sure and then a good meta description. Meta Keywords doesn't have any effect on rankings but it might help to make relevant ads show up on the site if your using Adsense or YPN.

 

Thank you for your response Web Gazelle. I had a feeling they were useless!

 

And to be slightly off-topic here, I'm hoping they're not serving that XHTML as an application of XML.

(But yeah, Web Gazelle covered it perfectly - those META tags aren't needed. Yahoo and MSN still use the META keywords tags, though they don't place much, if any, importance on them. They're just nice things to have, as well as "gentle reminders" of what keywords you're targeting for that page. Unfortunately it also means your competitors know too.

 

well, I don't think meta tag important enough. From what I read the most important is content, as long as you have a good content with a keywords it's better.

so IMHO title,description and keywords is enough

 

Yes.

As far as I'm concerned a good title tag and good content are the most important aspects of SEO.

I always include a description - mainly because it helps the click through rate in SE results.

Keyword tag is useless these days, but for some reason I still include it most the time.

 

Apart from the title and description tags I would also include the author tag

I know it sounds funny but Matt Cutts specified in an interview at Pubcon 2007 about the importance of having the business details on the website so I won't be surprised if they would give the author tag a sort of recognition and weight.
It's just a speculation but anyway it won't hurt having it there

If you want to watch the Pubcon interview I was talking about check UK SEO Forums under my sig

Thanks

 

Or just post the direct link to the video here...

 

meta keywords tag can be detrimental as it gives away the keywords you are targeting to competitors.

 

How about the expires tag? If a page isn't updated no more this might be good to prevent google-bot to spider it? If you have a lot of pages that aren't updated the spider still takes bandwidth from you.

and how about the updated tag? I don't remember what it's called exactly, but it tells the spider-bots when the page was updated so they know if they have to spider or not.

 

Bullocks. It's not detrminetal if you focus on things like providing quality content, a quality product or service instead of OCDing on your META keywords tags.

Both are pointless since the search enigne spiders will crawl your site when THEY want to, not when you want them to.

 

Yeah I'd just say it helps for contextual advertising but from a SEO standpoint just title and keywords matter.

 

I used to put keywords...and now only put title/description.

Do yourself a favor.....

Find the biggest brand name competitors in your field that have large websites online. Find out what they do, and analyze their tags.

I started analyzing googe/yahoo/msn tags...and just did what they did.

A lot of ppl swear differently...but I'm sure these billion dollar companies are hiring the best SEO ppl.....and most of them only use title, description, and robots. I dont see the keywords or author being used at all.

 

There is nothing harm to use them, I tell you there are many SEOs and webmaster who prefer them.

But even though they are useless. Title and Description are the tags which are important as well as useful and used by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live.com

 

I meant detrimental as in let competitors target the same keywords as you are targeting.

 

Im Using three (3) meta tags:

Meta Description
Meta Keywords
Meta Robot

 

Let them try. The only way they're going to get past me is if they have better content than I do, know how to properly author accessible, easy to use Web documents, and actually know how to really treat their users like royalty.

But that's me.

 

I will go with title, description, and robots.
Though recommend to use all other tags also excluding Keyword,

 

Title and Description are the most important and in use these days by web crawlers and search engines.
using keyowrds and author tag along with robot is not at all a bad practice, but take my words it will not gonna help you in any way.
Keywords will help you if you are using adsense, because it will helps in displaying the ads according to your content and keywords