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Google Does Not Care About Keyword Metatags
Posted in: Blog, SEO, Web Design by Scott on September 30, 2009
To finally put it to rest, on Monday Matt Cutts posted on the Google Webmaster Central Blog about whether or not Google uses keyword meta-tags for search ranking. The answer is no.
What is all this about: In the old days websites would pack their meta tags with keywords that should have described their respective websites. Search bots would then crawl the site and pick up on those meta-tags and would use that to define what the site was about. The problem was this got abused – and websites that had no relevant content at all would pack their meta-tags with the most popular keywords just to get searched. The result was that Google stopped searching this information because of the abuse. Some search engines still use this information, but Google does not use it for determining search ranking.
Two of the meta-tags in a site which are the most critical and searched and indexed by Google are the Description meta-tag and the page Title tag.
The Description meta-tag should be just that – a short description of the contents of the page, don’t make it long than 150 to 200 characters long because it will be the text that will be shown on the Google search page. And here is a key thing: In your description use the keywords that describe your site – because that will be what Google actually searches for relevant content.
The Title tag is also important, and is in fact one of the most important places to put your keywords and phrases. But don’t overload it, that will just annoy people, it should be kept to less than 12 words, and often much less. The title tag will be the main heading on the search results page, and it is what we humans will look for in deciding whether or not to click on that link. A good practice for Title tags is that they take the form:
<title>page title | organization or site name | short keyword rich phrase</title>
This gets the important information to the front the title – where we humans will read it. Then the keywords are at the back of the title – where the bots will read it.
For more information go to this LINK at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.
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