Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : SEO / SEM Discussions : SEO question

[fastnoc]

I'm trying to work on some things to improve my meta data in my pages.

I've written a script that takes all the tags that are generated for each post and puts them in the keyword tag.

But I want to do the same with the description. My problem is there is a lot of html data in the summary of the posts. I've got a stripper that removes entities and hard code but it leaves in the quotes. The problem with that is the quotes stop the description. it ends the tag.

Are meta descriptions really important or am I just spinning my wheels? i know the keywords are important.

[uberhostNET]

Meta descriptions only provide a suggestion for the search engine to use the text as a description to compliment your link in their listings. Meta keywords are largely ignored by major search engines these days. Having a number of high-quality backlinks is what really counts.

[fastnoc]

Yeah that's what I figured bummer.

Here's something though. What about tags? I just wrote some tag stuff into my code so each blog post had tags under it.

Does something like that make ANY difference?

FYI I know backlinks are good. seach hillary clinton or just hillary and I hit the front page. though I wish I could be number one. The words hillary clinton are probably mentioned a million times in the site, all in valid context.

But again, what about tags?

<<<removed>>>

[dawhb]

I wouldn't sugets you to include tags generated for each post in the description. It is enough a if a subject of the articles, news, post or anything that is meaningful to be included in the Meta tag's Title.

It is about content not just about meta tags. Playing with them can harm the visibility of the pages.

[crandall87]

You'll find good content and good sue of formatting tags, <h>, <p> etc will give you betetr results than meta tags.

[ChristsLittleFlock]

I agree that meta tags really aren't important anymore. But the description can be used for the blurb shown in search results, so you might want to at least set that. I set keywords too just because, really.

For the description, perhaps take the first sentence of the post up to 255 characters, truncating it if a full sentence isn't read and appending an ellipsis. That's what I would do.

[fastnoc]

Great suggestions. I appreciate this help a lot guys. I'm still very new to this and I'm learning tons.

What about <p> tags? if you start a block with a div tag, do you still need to start a paragraph? I didn't think that was true so I'm not sure what you mean.

[ChristsLittleFlock]

p tags shouldn't matter; no you don't need a p tag if you only have one paragraph within a div tag, but that's really up to you.

I think the major point was though that it's best to organize your content well and use h# tags for heading each section. I'll also tell you from an accessibility standpoint that h# tags are a lot easier for blind people to navigate through to jump to the start of each content section. I recommend putting an h1 at the start of the page content at least. What effect this has on SEO, I don't know but it was mentioned above so I thought I'd elaborate.

Of course the most important thing is to make sure your content includes the keywords you want to target, and also to get backlinks for those keywords from quality pages. Of course don't do keyword stuffing, and don't compromise the readability of the content. Some things I've done to include more keywords is putting a few of them in the title, and if I have a link where I want to use a keyword but not necessarily as the text, I put it in the title of the link.

[Fixago]

Originally Posted by Azavia

p tags shouldn't matter; no you don't need a p tag if you only have one paragraph within a div tag, but that's really up to you.

If you have a paragraph, use a paragraph tag. That's what it's for. HTML is about using the correct, semantic markup. A div tag is used for markup that has no relevant tag to match.

And meta tags are essentially worthless. I don't bother filling them in anymore, search engines come up with descriptions based on the keywords on your page and the surrounding text to come up with a description.

They also come up with their own keywords, relevancy, and density.

[ChristsLittleFlock]

Of course you should use them, but the question was if they are needed, and the answer is no. The HTML is perfectly valid if you just put text inside a div.

As for the meta tags, that's what everyone has been saying. But if you want to control what description it gives then the description meta tag can be useful.

[smqt]

Can't you change the stripper to take out quotes?
You sound like you know what you're doing?

I think it's nice to do this for the meta-description but wouldn't bother doing it to get keywords because you would have to take out all kinds of words to get usefull keywords. (and as said keywords aren't really used anymore).

I suspect lines of tags don't get picked up as keywords since they are on every site and Google is probably smart enough to recognize them as such.
Also, be carefull because Google seems to interpret non-content (like lists of random keywords) as spam.

[Fixago]

Originally Posted by Azavia

Of course you should use them, but the question was if they are needed, and the answer is no. The HTML is perfectly valid if you just put text inside a div.

As for the meta tags, that's what everyone has been saying. But if you want to control what description it gives then the description meta tag can be useful.

Well if you want to get technical, you don't even need divs, you can build your entire site using nothing but unordered lists. The HTML will be valid, but it's not semantically correct. It's like using a hammer to open a can of beans when you have a perfectly good can opener.

And if SEO is your purpose, then being semantic and using appropriate tags should be one of your top concerns.

As for controlling the description, Google will still use the search terms entered, find where they are on your page, and pick surrounding text to display, regardless of what you enter.

Why waste time? I have too many PR4+ sites with thousands of pages to go back and start entering in keywords and descriptions that probably won't do a damn thing.

Meta tags should die, they're really only good for internal things, and this isn't 1996 anymore.

[ChristsLittleFlock]

Again, I agree you should, in fact I strongly agree you should, but for it to validate it's not required. that's all my point was. Nothing more.

Google does use the description meta tag though. Whether you use it or not is up to the individual and it won't hurt not using it, but it does use it sometimes. For instance if you enter site:www.example.com with no search terms it'll default to the page description. I'm not sure what other contexts it will use it in but that is definitely one.

I don't disagree they're all but pointless now, and it really doesn't matter one way or another. You're making an argument out of nothing. Using a description or keywords in the meta tags will not help with SEO; everyone agrees here I believe.

[fastnoc]

I just assumed that if there's only one paragraph, and you're defining a block there wasn't any point in a <p> tag becuase there's no separation. I figured if i was doing multiple paragraphs then it made sense.

Also,I don't think Google would pick up a site and specify it as spam if it had tags in it. That's getting to be very popular, and there are valid reasons for it. I mean a real tag is like a category created on the fly. There are good uses. I created a cloudtag today out of my tags. I guess I could see that as spammy but I have to think that as smart as google is it would recognize this and not automatically pump it to spam. But of course that's just my assumption.

I THINK my site is using a decent structure. course I'm not 100% sure but I'm using the h tags. I mean if someone can point out something I'm doing wrong feel free. I'd be happy to know so I can fix it.

This is very important to me right now because the primaries are 6 months away. When hillary announced our traffic skyrocketed. It's going to become very important and more and more need structure improvements.

Please don't get on topic of the site's content and realize my goal is here is much broader than just this blog. I've got numerous other sites i'm working on and this info that I get is very important.

So, anyway. I'm not sure about the tags. maybe I should remove the cloud. hell I don't know.

FYI I'm not so clear on pagerank either. this site has a rank of 5. but that was back when the structure SUCKED on the site. before I redesigned it. It still has the same rank, 8 months later. I don't think they update that rank much at all. -

[smqt]

Originally Posted by fastnoc

Also,I don't think Google would pick up a site and specify it as spam if it had tags in it. That's getting to be very popular, and there are valid reasons for it.

I think I was unclear non-native speaker.
I didn't mean tags get picked up as spam, but I do suspect that Google can recognize them for what they are, and may treat them as content that is less important.
I don't think you should remove tag-clouds and the tags beneath each post look funtional; I'm just not very sure that they will do much in terms of SEO.
Good luck.