What is Meta data? Meta data or Meta tags are invisible to an average user, but help explain the contents of a Web page to a browser. Meta keywords and description are the 2 most common tags people refer to. An example of a Meta data is:

meta name=”description” content=”Buy and sell electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, digital cameras, and everything else on eBay, the world’s online marketplace. Sign up and begin to buy and sell - auction or buy it now - almost anything on eBay.com.”

META name=”keywords” content=”ebay, electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, ebay, digital cameras, antiques, tickets, jewelry, online shopping, auction, online auction”

The Meta Tag Myth

For years people believed that meta tags were the secret to high rankings in search engines. Even now we have a major publishing client who insists our SEO work should only consist of providing them with meta data. The truth is, most major search engines do not take Meta data into consideration for search rankings.

Does that mean that Meta tags are useless? No. While Meta data is ignored by Google, it does play a role in Yahoo’s new search, and the Meta description is often the description used in the search results page.

The truth is, search engines change their algorithm often. If you are going through the effort of optimizing your site, it makes sense to include writing unique, relevant, keyword rich Meta descriptions and keywords for every page.

Keep Meta keywords less than 20 terms and description less than 50 words. Do not use a term over and over.

For example:
Digital camera, digital camera, digital camera, digital camera

But, you can use:
Digital camera, digital cameras, cannon digital cameras, SLR digital camera

There are other types of Meta tags, such as robot tags, that we will cover in later additions.

Next step….SEO 103 – The Importance of Content in Search Engine Optimization

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.