In a previous post, we talked about what meta tags are whether they're important to the search engines. We're going to continue that discussion here and add a few other thoughts.
As the Internet has become more crowded with e-commerce sites, the race to attract traffic through the free search engines has greatly intensified.
In fact, today it's all-out war when it comes to competing for top billing: the rush to grab the very highest search engine rankings for competitive key words that drive tons of traffic to the winners.
Web site owners have come up with all sorts of tricks and strategies to "fool" the search engines into believing that their site is more relevant and deserving of a higher ranking than their competitors.
They do that by stuffing lots of key words, and often irrelevant key words, into their meta tags. In addition, they submit web site descriptions that are false, too promotional in nature, and often are designed to attract web surfers by misleading or giving a description that isn't appropriate.
The professionals behind the search engine algorithms (the criteria behind how rankings are established) are smarter these days. They have designed ways for understanding what a web site is about without relying upon the owner's description.
In an effort to control web master fraud (or is it just "over zealousness"?) the search engines don't explain the criteria and methodology behind their own rankings. They don't want to give away their secrets because as soon as they do, there will be those that try to exploit the system.
My understanding is that the largest and most important engine, Google, doesn't pay any attention to meta tags as it indexes sites. In fact, the engineers at Google punish or penalize sites in their rankings that they suspect are trying to cheat the system.
So, not only do you have to be honest and truthful about your description and key words . . . you need to be careful that you don't overdo it in any way. You shouldn't be repeating key words multiple times or use hyperbole or exaggeration in your web description.
Don't overly be concerned or fret about meta tags. They can be added with very little difficulty. There are many sources of help online that can take care of your meta tags for you as a freelance service, or as a paid professional service from a full-fledged SEO company (search engine optimization).
My advice, if you don't know where to turn quite yet is to do a little research on meta tags and optimization in general. If you site is very, very specialized and you have few competitors, you may not need much assistance in getting good search engine rankings; however, that is usually not the case. Most of us need to be doing everything we can to improve upon our rankings and drive more traffic to our sites.
Here's a good place to start. Bruce Clay is a very authoritative and credible individual, an expert in the field of SEO. His web site gives excellent information, advice about the industry, and a framework for viewing search engine strategies that you'll undoubtedly find enlightening.
Bruce states, "It is not enough to simply add META tags and do search engine submission of your site to a million search engine indexes and directories. The first placement step in obtaining significant web visitor counts is to seek first-page search engine results."
You don't get first page results overnight and without significant work and expertise. I would recommend you visit Bruce's site and learn all about the ways to improve your site's rankings.
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