This came up on Twitter the other day, I thought some people here
might be interested. In a nutshell Google have officially stated that
the keywords meta tag is ignored in search ranking. They also stated
that the description meta tag is only used for adding content to
search results. The contents of the tag are not used in ranking.
I hope this is of interest to some of you.
Joe
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Interesting. I’m working with an SEO company to integrate into my client’s web site the keywords, description and other meta info that the SEO people insist are critical to Google searches and other search engines.
So – if keywords are no longer valuable to Google, what, I wonder, are the most critical elements that Google actually trolls for?
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This is oversimplified but: Google look at visible and machine
readable content (such as HTML text). Make sure there’s enough content
and that it’s all as relevant as possible. If you turn off images on
your site and can’t tell what it’s about from the remaining text then
it doesn’t have enough content. Links play a large part too, get some
links from highly ranked sites to your site and it should increase
your ranking too (this is, of course, harder to do than adding content).
Joe
On 25 Sep 2009, at 17:53, LauraB wrote:
Interesting. I’m working with an SEO company to integrate into my
client’s web site the keywords, description and other meta info that
the SEO people insist are critical to Google searches and other
search engines.So – if keywords are no longer valuable to Google, what, I wonder,
are the most critical elements that Google actually trolls for?
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Long ago I made certain that my text was prepared in HTML so that it would be readable and that it was instantly relevant to searches. In other words, significant words that might be those a searcher might use are incorporated into the copy and high, high up the page. I’ve also put alternate tags for all my images. But these SEO people are absolutely adamant about keywords and description meta tags. I also had to put the same stuff on every page. I fought vigorously to avoid using the same stuff for titles – which they actually wanted to do. That one I won.
Anyway, all very interesting. I’ll be having a conversation with one of these SEO guys today. I’ll be asking him about this.
Thanks for your insight, Joe. I’m no expert by far, but I try to stay informed and follow the advice on this most excellent forum and other places.
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I’ve improved search rankings by giving each page a different, descriptive title. Make the titles specific to the page content. This seemed to help the SEO quite a bit.
I also had to put the same stuff on every page. I fought vigorously to avoid using the same stuff for titles — which they actually wanted to do. That one I won.
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JimS, that would seem to me to make all the sense in the world. But this SEO company, which my client is paying for, insists that just like the keywords they want, the descriptive phrases be identical on every page.
And here’s a fun one: The keywords they insisted on are identical to the descriptive phrases.
Thank goodness this company can’t just go into the code and change things. They wanted to, until I explained that every time I updated the site with as much as a new comma, my previous code would overwrite whatever they’d changed.
As I said, at least I was able to retain control of the individual titles on pages.
Boy, am I learning a lot about SEO companies!
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This is the key, Google likes unique content, and making each page
dedicated to a single subject helps a lot.
Its interesting now that Google says it ignores the keywords totally,
yet I has witnessed successes when key phrases (more than one word
separated by a comma) are used in combination with page title
description h1 content. Like LauraB has mentioned with their SEO
consultants. But of course there are other search engines out there
as the Google video mentions, that might use them.
The real key is being truthful to the machine readable content on the
page.
If you want to to have a look at this blog post it should help anyone
to get to grips with basics of SEO:
success-part-one/
David Owen ::
Freeway Friendly Web Hosting and Domains
On 25 Sep 2009, at 9:11 pm, JimS wrote:
I’ve improved search rankings by giving each page a different,
descriptive title. Make the titles specific to the page content.
This seemed to help the SEO quite a bit.I also had to put the same stuff on every page. I fought
vigorously to avoid using the same stuff for titles — which they
actually wanted to do. That one I won.
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