Adsense

Adwords

Affiliate Links

Algorithm Changes

Arms Race

.Com or .Co.uk?

Databases

Database Example

Duplicate Content

Hyphens

Index Speed

IP Addresses

Link Popularity

Link Relevance

Meta Tags

Monitoring

Next Year Ahead

One Roof (all under)

Organic v Paid

Page Rank

Pay Per Click

Quality Criteria

Repeat Keywords

Supatags™

Word Per Page

Yahoo!

SEO > Articles > New York 2004 >

How important are meta tags in the current search climate? Does the keyword tag have any relevance any more?

In the early days a search engine optimisation, it was easy to gain extra traffic simply by stuffing large volumes of keywords in the meta tags. As these tags became more and more abused by spammers, search engines gave them less and less relevance, with Google usually ignoring the keyword text completely.

Now that Yahoo has broken away from using Google's search results, the keyword tag does have a small amount of relevance again. Each page should therefore have a short list of perhaps 10 of the most relevant keywords which apply to the content being presented. Only words which appear in the body text should be used in the keywords tag. The description is still picked up by several search engines, including Google's results from time to time. It is most important that the description uses a natural language sentence, and is not simply used to stuff in as many keywords as possible. All meta tags should be unique to each page .