No meta tags theory.

So I was thinking, why bother with all those meta tags?

It just make you look desperate to the SE.

I can see the SE bot thinking: "Oh great another perfect SEO page, what a loser, I'm going to red flag him just for trying to hard! :evil:"

Here's how some of my websites headers look:

voila

Let the SEs sort it out on themselves I say.

I personally think it makes your site seem more legit, more 'real'.

Its just a theory, I have not experienced any difference on how my sites get indexed except that Google chooses the descriptions, useally Site Title + H1 + Top Content.

..so what do you think? Does it matter?

 

Well meta keywords has been seen not to matter in search engines any more anyways and in my opinion the importance of meta tags in general seems to be declining when relating them to search engines, however for the time it takes i feel it is still worth doing them properly.

 

It's a good theory if you want something like this displaying in the SERP's to attract click thru's:

 

that would be a nice theory. i will try to experiment on that with one of my website.

 

No I've never seen that (with my own sites). Why would google index a menu? (Sure, we've all seen strange things happening on the SEs)

I usually html like this:

This way you are telling google what to index(?)

 

name="description" is an important tag, not only it generates a nice looking description for google and msn, but it has weight at least in msn and I am almost sure some in google.

 

how is that working out for you?

 

I don't worry too much about the keyword meta tag, but the description meta tag is one of the top 4 SEO things you can do on the page (title, description, h1 tag, url).

Your page title and description should be seen as much in advertising terms as SEO terms. The title and description are what show most often in the search engines when one of your pages comes up. If you make them a good call to action you can increase the number of clicks your site will get especially if you don't hold the #1 position in the SERPs.

 

The use of meta tags may not help you that much in SE rankings, but it's good practice in my book.

 

While metatags it doesn't influence SERP ranking per se it does influence click through

I usually recommend our clients to type in description and keywords on all important pages (frontpage, landing pages, product pages etc) as I believe a well written description matters. Keywords is more to get them into the thought that the copy on every single page is based around the specific keywords.

However there is no guarantee that Google will show your description. If it finds text on your page that it thinks is more important it will show that, whatever it is - menu, footer text, snippets from content copy...

 

if there is very less content on the site or not content at all.. then i think meta description matters for search engines..

 

I think metas are still important and still works if you want to rank in SEs. Just do it properly and make it looks more legit and not spammy type. This is what we usually do in our sites. well, by doings these, we never have a regrets, we're happy with the results.