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There is
a big debate within the SEO community on whether or not
the meta tags are even used now days by some of the major
search engines. Some will say that a major SE like Google
no longer look at the meta tag information (keywords meta
tag) and instead will analyze the title, text, links and
link text to determine what the website is about.
Others will say that the major
SE's, like Yahoo! look at the meta tag information (including
the keywords met tag) but just give it less weight than
they used to give it. The days of spamming a keywords meta
tag in order to achieve high rankings are long gone.
Since no one knows definitively
how or if the meta tags are still used by the major SE's
and since meta tag optimization will not hurt your website
in the rankings it is still a good idea to optimize the
meta tag information.
First, it is a good idea to
perform meta tag optimization because it may help with some
of the search engines like Yahoo! and some of the minor
SE's. Second, it is helpful to perform meta tag optimization
since it will help clarify the important keywords for the
person who is optimizing the web site. The keywords in a
meta tag need to match the keywords chosen for a web page
or web site. Knowing your keywords will help to keep you
on task.
Third, when submitting a web
site to some directories, the directory may spider your
web site looking only at the meta tag info for the verbiage
to include in their site. If meta tag optimization has not
been performed on a page, then the directory spider will
come up empty and may fail to index your web site. If meta
tag optimization has been conducted prior to your link building
campaign, it will save a lot of time when coming across
sites that spider your pages for this information.
So, meta tag optimization
may not be as important as it used to be as far as attaining
high rankings in the search engines, but it is still may
be important for some SE's. In addition, it is important
in helping to clarify the important keywords for the web
page or site and it is also important when submitting your
site to a directory that spiders web pages. Meta tag optimization
cannot hurt you, but it can help you so it is still an important
part of search engine optimization.
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