Some website owners spam the keywords tag with lots of keyword. We know in SERP;s where we can find our web pages title & description but have you seen taht including a keyword in keyword tags had help to get rankings. No... So i assume keyword tags mean very litle or nothing in compare to other factors in Google.
in my opinion, they are even more important than building back links. orelse how can people and SEs know what's your site about.
Don't want to get too Necro here, but I didn't want to start a new thread and get chastised for not using the search. So here goes. What about an e-commerce site that has thousands of pages. Do we know Google feels about a META description repeating a few hundred times? Right now I've got, say 20 different product lines. Each of the product lines has a different standard META description. So in each line there might be 500 or 1,000 items for sale, each with a similar meta description. Is this bad? Each page has a regular 'content based' description (ie on the page, not in the meta). Should I duplicate that for the META? Any consensus out there? Thanks in advance.
Not sure what you mean by "The basic of SEO". Are you saying my question is basic, as to not even warrant an answer? Or something else?
I'm no expert on Google or titles/meta tags, but recently my site took a severe drop in the SERPs. I had not made any significant changes to my site so I couldn't quite figure out why it happened. I went to my Webmaster Tools and found (for the first time), that apparently 84 pages on my site had duplicate title tags and 70 had duplicate meta tags. This occurred because some of my articles are two and three pages long and apparently I had gotten sloppy and although I changed the content on the second or third page, I did not use unique titles or meta tags. After all, it was just page 2 and 3 of the same article. I don't know if I was not paying attention, but I never saw those warnings before. Of course, a big drop in search engine results will make a person search high and low to find the problem. I recently went through my site and made the changes. While I was at it, I updated my site map because a couple of my pages had the same content in two different directories (a product of revamping my site) so I had to do a couple of 301 redirects. I don't know if the corrections will return my traffic (only time will tell) but I learned first hand that Google does look at titles and they also look at the meta tags.
Descriptions are VERY IMPORTANT for Google. Maybe not for affecting SERP position, but you must include descriptions and make sure that your descriptions are DIFFERENT for all pages. If you have the same description for all pages, they will all get lumped together, because Google will (rightly) treat them as being basically the same page. Make sure each page has a unique title, and a unique description (not the same as the title).
I dnt know why everyone is saying Google ignores the keyword tags. Someone said it in a forum years ago and now everyone believes it without testing it. Google doesn't just flat out "ignore" the keyword tag and I know this for a fact because I test it often. What I do sometimes to test is I will make a spelling mistake in my keyword tag and repeat the word nowhere else on my site. Or I will use a keyword that is related, but not repeated anywhere else in my site. I do not use it in the body, the title, the description, nowhere. It will ONLY apears in my keyword tag. And the results? I often rank / get traffic for those spelling mistakes / keywords that I use deliberately in my keyword tag only. How did I find this out? by mistake off course, I made a spelling mistake one day or had the keyword phrase nowhere else but in the keyword tag, and was starting to come up for searches in Google. Couldn't figure out why I was ranking, went throu my site with a fine toothcomb and couldnt find it in the body, title, description nowhere... then discovered it in my keyword tag. Since then I have experimented often. People who say google does not look at the keyword tag and ignores it are not correct and I know this from numerous testing, not just because someone started chanting the mantra years ago on a forum somewhere. Does google give a lot of weight to the keyword tag? No, i do not think so, title still remains the most important, statistical testing has show as much as 25% of your ranking. But google definitely does not ignore your keyword tag like the popular thinking is. It takes 1 minute to create, do it, it will not hurt you, you may just get that 1% extra boost but it is worth it. I promise you, google is not just "ignoring" the keyword tag, it does look at it. This is not from hearsay, this is from seeing it for myself and testing it constantly.
Just a brief follow up for anyone who might come across this in the future... Making sure my META descriptions are all different has definitely helped. I'm seeing more and more of those pages showing up in google, once I make sure they have unique descriptions.
I also kept using the keyword tags for a couple of reasons. First, it gives weight to the keywords on the page and shows relation, second, some search engines still reflected that it was being used. You break it down for others well.
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions are very valuable SEO wise. Just remember to stay under 70 characters for the Title and 150 characters for the Description. Regards, Dustin