Meta tags

[emark]

Does it matter what order the meta tags are in? And what about that often seen but never talked about Alt tag for images. Does that tag have any benefit with search engines?

Order of the meta tags as in:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>Web Page Title</title>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">
<meta name="description" content="whatever your description is">
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword, keyword1, keyword2">

Or would the benefits be the same as:

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1 keyword2">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">
<meta name="description" content="whatever your description is">

[Sinfully Wicked]

META Keywords are not really used in todays optimization and have no benefit. Of course, most people still add them from habit.

[Doc Com]

Originally Posted by Sinfully Wicked

META Keywords are not really used in todays optimization and have no benefit.

This is highly untrue.

Originally Posted by emark

Does it matter what order the meta tags are in?

To a degree, yes.

If you have analytics capability, you'll know what people are searching for.

You are limited to the amount of characters for description.

Likewise, you are limited to the amount of characters for keywords.

In complex sites the cater to an industry or a broad audience, add meta-tags in the order of most searched for terms.

[draggar]

Originally Posted by Sinfully Wicked

META Keywords are not really used in todays optimization and have no benefit. Of course, most people still add them from habit.

I think a better way to put it is that they do not carry as much weight as they used to. Yes, they can help but there are far better ways of improving SEO - good and original content, continual updates, backlinks, etc..

[Sinfully Wicked]

Prove me wrong.

[Doc Com]

Originally Posted by Sinfully Wicked

Prove me wrong.

Prove you are right!

Too many people are making assumptions based on one search algorithm and have suddenly discounted the value of meta-tags.

You were first to state that they have no use and value. So support this statement.

[Sinfully Wicked]

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020918.html

[Doc Com]

Originally Posted by Doc Com

Too many people are making assumptions based on one search algorithm and have suddenly discounted the value of meta-tags.

Rinse and repeat.

[biggedon]

Originally Posted by Sinfully Wicked

META Keywords are not really used in todays optimization and have no benefit. Of course, most people still add them from habit.

Originally Posted by Doc Com

Prove you are right!

Too many people are making assumptions based on one search algorithm and have suddenly discounted the value of meta-tags.

You were first to state that they have no use and value. So support this statement.

Get' em Doc!

i still use meta

[Sinfully Wicked]

Haha, everyone has there own way of doing things.

[HomerJ]

google answered in response to a recent lawsuit that they do not use the keywords metatag in their algorithm. i just read this on someones blog yesterday however i think that other search engines may still use them so its not a bad idea to include them. cant hurt imo

[south]

I still use them too, but it would appear that google at least is not using the keyword tags anymore: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...-meta-tag.html

[Doc Com]

I have a site that currently has had over 691,000 users from 676 sources, 28,467 different IP's, and has logged 1,615 search terms. This is solely 2009 numbers.

Until I have concrete proof that all those using my site did not reach it via some of my meta-tagging efforts and that all IP's use the same Browsers and search engines, and that all search terms have have incorporated into the site's ranking, I will continue to use meta-tags.

Depending on which search term I enter, I rank anywhere from #1-#10 on both Google and Yahoo with some terms occupying #1, #3, and #7 spot. All of this ranking has been done without ever paying a penny to buy traffic or spent on adsense or an other paid service.

[sdsinc]

Meta tags probably have no SEO benefits nowadays.
It's no reason to discard them, at least have a decent meta description tag so that the search engines display a meaningful description of your site. You will get more visits
Even if google ignores them for SEO purposes, other search engines may take them into consideration. For example I believe that if you want to rank for a typo it's a good idea to add it in the meta tags for yahoo.

[emark]

So what's the verdict? Should the tags be left in or not?

Will having the meta tags in the code prove to be a problem maybe later? Is it possible that the search engines could/would stop crawling a site because of the tags being present?

Are there enough smaller search engines using the tags to justify keeping them in? Don't most get their results from the big guys like Google, Yahoo, and now Bing anyway? The day will come when all engines will follow the majors and have the same requirements. I wonder how far away that is.

[tristanperry]

Originally Posted by emark

So what's the verdict? Should the tags be left in or not?

Will having the meta tags in the code prove to be a problem maybe later? Is it possible that the search engines could/would stop crawling a site because of the tags being present?

Are there enough smaller search engines using the tags to justify keeping them in? Don't most get their results from the big guys like Google, Yahoo, and now Bing anyway? The day will come when all engines will follow the majors and have the same requirements. I wonder how far away that is.

They won't harm you at all. They won't benefit you when it comes to Google, Yahoo etc, although they certainly won't harm your site's rankings (and, of course, other sites/directories/search engines may use them) so it's worth keeping them in.

Besides, it's only the meta keyword tag under discussion - the rest of them (especially the meta description tag) can be pretty useful.

As mentioned above, the meta description is very useful since the SEs (especially Google) sometimes use that to display a meaningful description of your site in the SERPs. So say you had a shop, you may put "Get the best deals on [product/service] here, now with a 10% discount!" (or something like that, but good ) and that'll show up as your description, thus increasing the chances that people click through to your site.

So yeah, meta tags are a good thing (and meta keyword tags won't help much but certainly won't harm you), so keep them in It just provides background information about your website. Nothing wrong with that.

[PRIYE]

Whether or not you use meta-tags and which ones you use depends upon the purpose of your site. Some sites will find it very useful to include many of these tags to precisely control how their site is seen and used. Others simply do not care as long as visitors arrive in mass.

[grace5]

they are a plus for adsense ads

[dncsacnt]

Like a lot have said, it wouldn't hurt to still use meta tags whether it has a significant effect on your seo efforts or not. Since it still has a good effect to your site on generating traffic.

[meganerd]

Google and the other major search engines still pay attention to the title and description tags but less on the keyword tags. This is because people used to keyword stuff that area.

HOWEVER, it's still a good idea to use them because google, yahoo, msn aren't the only ones indexing sites. I always include them.