Questions and Answers Related to Search Engine Marketing

The most commonly asked question we are asked is: Does Google (or any other search engines) read the "Keyword" (or other) meta tags?

Read an interesting excerpt from From Search Engine Watch, Death Of A Meta Tag, authored by Danny Sullivan, Editor of Search Engine Watch back in October, 2002

Searchenginewatch.com The source for search engine marketing
The Death Of A Meta Tag
By Danny Sullivan, Editor - October 1, 2002

Traffick.com's Andrew Goodman wrote recently in an essay about meta tags, "If somebody would just declare the end of the metatag era, full stop, it would make it easier on everyone."

I'm happy to oblige, at least in the case of the meta keywords tag. Now supported by only one major crawler-based search engine -- Inktomi -- the value of adding meta keywords tags to pages seems little worth the time.  In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead. And like Andrew, good riddance, I say!

The Rise & Fall Of The Meta Keywords Tag

For those unaware, the meta keyword tag is a way to insert text into an HTML page that is not visible when the page is viewed through a browser. Some search engines have read the content of the tag and associated the words within it along with the page's regular body copy.

The first major crawler-based search engines to use the meta keyword tag were Infoseek and AltaVista. It's unclear which one provided support first, but both were offering it in early 1996. When Inktomi launched in mid-1996 through the HotBot search engine, it also provided support for the tag. Lycos did the same in mid-1997, taking support up to four out of the seven major crawlers at the time (Excite, WebCrawler and Northern Light did not provide support).

The ascendancy of the tag did not last after 1997. Experience with the tag has showed it to be a spam magnet. Some web site owners would insert misleading words about their pages or use excessive repetition of words in hopes of tricking the crawlers about relevancy. For this reason, Excite (which also owned WebCrawler) resisted added support. Lycos quietly dropped its support of the tag in 1998, and newer search engines such as Google and FAST never added support at all.

After Infoseek (Go.com) closed in 2000, the meta keyword tag was left with only two major supporters: AltaVista and Inktomi. Now Inktomi remains the only one, with AltaVista having dropped its support in July, the company says.

"In the past we have indexed the meta keywords tag but have found that the high incidence of keyword repetition and spam made it an unreliable indication of site content and quality.
 

Another knowledgeable author had this to say:
"Google does not consider meta tags with one exception: the title tag. This can be manipulated to some extent by including a couple of key terms with your title tag. The visible title on the site would still be short, but the spiders would pick up on the longer title. As far as getting Google excited about all those meta tags for description and key words, it won't happen." 

The "Title" and "Description" meta tags STILL retain importance.  

Dr. Ralph Wilson, a knowledgeable and experienced web marketer has this to say about the "Description" tag:

Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and key phrases used on this page. If you include keywords that aren't used on the webpage you could hurt yourself.  Your maximum number of characters should be about 255.  Just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.

When Wilson prepares web pages, he writes the description first in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and phrases included in the article. For the keywords META tag, he strips out the most common words, leaving just the meaty words and phrases.

He states that "The keywords META tag is no longer used for ranking by Google and many other search engines, but it is currently used by Yahoo*, so I'm leaving it in."  (*Inktomi, web search provider, became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo in March, 2003)

Shari Thurow, another knowledgeable search engine guru summarizes: "The Title tag is much more important than other meta tags because all of the major search engines use the Title tag content to determine relevancy.  Very few search engines use meta tag content to determine relevancy.  Even if a search engine such as Yahoo uses meta tag content, the content is nowhere near as important as the HTML Title tag and main content."

There is obviously MUCH more to being found in Google than just adding keyword meta tags!!