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January 07 ABCs of Web Design Newsletter

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Introductory comments

Happy new year! I have been very sick so I missed many newsletters. I am hoping the new year will bring better health. Onto the question...

Question of the month

Question: I received several emails asking about the importance of META tag information (Title, Description and Keywords) in SEO.

Answer: Are META tags still important?

From Highrankings.com:

“The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don't affect your page's ranking in the search engines (for the most part)…”

“Since the search engines use a wide variety of factors to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore you should certainly use meta tags (including the meta keyword tag), along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that still read them. At worst, it won't hurt your rankings (unless you brazenly keyword stuff them). I still use these meta tags on clients' Web sites, but don't bother with them on my own sites.”

Is the META tag dead?

From the article “Death Of A Meta Tag”:

"The meta keywords value is just one of many factors in our ranking equation, and we've never given too much weight to it. That said, we will continue to use it as long as our relevance modeling shows that it adds value," said Ken Norton, director of product marketing for Inktomi web search division.

I'm certainly not crying over the decline of the meta keywords tag. It's always been a confusing issue for site owners. Should I use commas between words in the tag or not? How many times can I repeat a word on the page without getting banned? If I don't list a term in the tag, does that mean my page won't show up? Those are common questions consistently raised over the years and represent time wasted worrying about a page element that a minority of crawlers supported -- and for those that did, an element that was assigned little if any ranking boost.”

Indeed, my advice about the meta keywords tag for ages has been simple. For those running large web sites or short on time, don't worry about it. The stress and time involved in trying to craft a tag was not worth it, in terms of the minor benefit it might bring. It is far more important for site owners to instead concentrate on creating good title tags for their pages, a key page element that has consistently shown it can help with ranking across all major crawlers.

Now I can make my advice about the meta keywords tag even easier. Just don't use the tag at all! Obviously, if you personally find it or believe it to be useful, keep doing so. But I suspect it's just a waste of time, for most people.”

From “An End to Metatags”:

“Metatags, as many in the industry are aware, were an early victim, succumbing to the opportunism of web site owners. Marketers, particularly operators of porn sites, which made up much of the money-making power of Internet commerce circa 1995, made search engines like Altavista look pretty silly. Search engines which looked at and took metatags seriously were riddled with spam (insincere pages which manipulated their metatags in order to rank higher in searches) until they began more aggressively filtering spam with increasingly sophisticated ranking methods and filters.

Today, some search engines still look at metatags, but increasingly they put much more emphasis on both visible text on the page and "off-page factors" (popularity, linking structure of the Internet, etc.) to measure page relevance. Google doesn't bother with metatags - it doesn't even incorporate the description tag in the summary of page contents, preferring to grab text from the page itself.”

SEO how-to articles

Recent Clients of W-edge design:

Moonhorse Art Studio
Cabella Creations
Compton Creative
Healing Environments with Feng Shui
Chicago Performance Driving Academy
The Speed Factory

****Wrap up****

I still add META tags to my sites but I do not put a lot of stock into them. If they help a little great but most of my effort into key-word dense site text. That will give you the most bang for your buck.

I am also very happy to report that the DigitalEve Columbus, still in ASP pages, is once again at the top of Google!

Please send all questions to theresaw@columbus.rr.com.

To see the articles from my print web column, go to http://www.w-edge.com/articles.htm

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