Keyword Meta Tags Will Not Increase Rankings by Lioness Consulting

Lioness Consulting offers patent law services including software patents, computer patents, internet patents, communications patents, and technology patents in Franklin, Massachusetts.

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This week, Meta Tags, once and for all:

Meta tags is a subject that makes me want to scream. It seems each week, someone on one of the forums I'm on will ask, "How can I increase my Page Rank or rankings within Google (or some other search engine)?", and someone else will pipe in with, "You have to add keywords to your meta tags". Makes me want to scream. Loudly.

First of all, there are different types of meta tags. There is the title meta tag (which is the title that shows up at the top of the browser when the web page is displayed). There is the description meta tag, which some search engines use to describe the web page when a listing is displayed. There is the robots meta tag which can be used to tell some spiders not to crawl a given web page. The meta tags that people are referring to when they give this 'advice' is the keyword meta tag.

There once was a time when certain search engines used the keyword meta tag as a way to rate and rank web pages. Want to show up in a certain category in search engine results? Add it to your keyword meta tag. Want to show up even higher? Add it repeatedly to your keyword meta tag. Want to show up in a category that has absolutely nothing to do w/ your web page? Just add keywords in your keyword meta tag that relate to that category (even if it has absolutely nothing to do w/ your web page).

This is where the problems began. People began 'spamming' the search engines by repeatedly putting the same keywords in their description meta tag. Or, they put words that had nothing to do w/ the contents of their web pages. The search engines became wise to this method, and started cracking down on this, and other types of spamming.

These days, virtually all of the search engines rely on the content of the web pages more so than the keyword meta tags (although, other meta tags, such as the title meta tag, do carry some weight). So, if you want to improve your rankings, especially with Google, put your efforts into the content of your web pages, not the keyword meta tag.

Hope this helps! Feel free to email Lesley if you run into any problems.