Blog Tycoon

Q: Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag?
A: It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.

These were rumours a year ago, and SEO experts had different versions of the truth. The Google giant search engine ignores keywords. Simple as that.

With an official statement, I’d better move on and delete all keywords meta tags from my sites. It’ll definitely save a few bytes per visitor.

The official example from Google is:

Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob’s site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her “keywords” meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words “AliceCo” to his “keywords” meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?

Well, that’s great. No more stealing keywords and ranking for them. I used to do this NOT with keywords but with related phrases inside my pages. The relatedness could go further depending on the scope of the article.

Should I care about other search engines? No. I’ve heard they played along.

1. Don’t use the same Title Tag throughout your site. Try using a unique Title tag for each web page and use your most important keywords in the Title tags that hold theme relevance to that page.
2. Don’t use any other META tags such as author, date, etc. unless you absolutely need it. This will just increase your page size and will not do any good to your site.
3. Most major engines cannot read frames so I will advice you that you don’t use it but If you must use frames, include important body text within a <noframes> tag.
4. Avoid using completely Flash designs because a majority of major engines can’t index flash sites and Flash sites take some time to open fully so it my be frustrating for visitors who don’t use a broadband to wait hours for the site to open.
5. Avoid using JavaScripts or JavaScript links. Spiders cannot crawl links in Java Script so its better that you don’t use JavaScripts but if you must use it then make sure that you use a text link at the bottom of each page.
6. Keyword stuffing: Keyword stuffing refers to the extremely repetition of a keyword when it is not even needed. Many people stuff keywords in their pages in order to increase their keyword density and thus get a high ranking. But be careful as I said its very very risky please don’t try this it may get you banned.
7. Invisible or Tiny text: Many webmasters use tiny text and invisible text in order to rank high by showing lots of text to search engines but at the same time making it invisible for the humans this also viewed as spam.
8. Never submit more than the allowed number of pages per engine per day or week. Each search engine has a limit and exceeding their limits can be seen as spamming the search engines.
9. Do not participate in link farms or link exchange programs. Search Engines have identified them as spam and they don’t want you to use it.
10. Don’t use “&id=” parameter if you want maximal Googlebot crawlage (many sites use “&id=” with session ID’s that Googlebot usually avoids URL’s with that parameter).
11. Don’t stuff your page with keywords and no content. The search engines will penalize you for this and view your page as spam.
12. Do not put redirects or META refresh tags on your page for any reason. They will get your pages banned from the search engines. A common trick used to be to create a page 100% text and highly search engine friendly but of 0% user value, then have a redirect to the real page. This doesn’t work anymore – avoid it.
13. Always remember to use navigation menu at the right side of each page of your site, why? Because search engines count the first few phrases appearing on the page, this way you would provide the search engines the content first. Or use CSS to position the DIVsboth with content and with navigation.
14. Make sure your site is search engine friendly. Its no use having the best site in the world which no one can find. And for everyone’s sake don’t mess around with hidden layers to get a high listing on the engines. It is JUST NOT worth the risk!
15. Don’t link to a bad neighbour, because linking to a bad neighbourhood can get your site banned from the search engines. As soon as his site gets banned by the search engine the search engine may ban you also.

Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com gives us some interesting video insight about how to optimize META description for search engines and why domain names play a role in SEO.

Meta description tags may appear in the search results below your page title. Descriptions should be formatted in compete sentences so they read well to humans. Google displays about 150 to 160 characters from meta description tags in their search results. If your description runs past 160 characters they will cut it short and add … at the end of their listing.

Many marketing and advertising costs are recurring. Re-registering domain names is a minimal cost, but many domains (especially .com names) get type in traffic worth thousands of dollars a year. Some get type in traffic worth thousands per day. And this traffic stream is defensible from search engine algorithmic swings.

Check out the articles to see the videos.