Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Meta Tags’ Category

Google is telling the world what every seasoned webmaster and search marketer should already know: The keywords meta tag has no impact whatsoever on how Google’s search engine ranks pages. None. Zilch. Nada. And while Google often needs to be somewhat ambiguous when talking about how it ranks pages, the message in today’s blog post is perfectly clear:

    “Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.”

Google’s blog post also talks about an imagined clash between two web site owners, Bob and Alice, over Bob’s use of Alice’s business name in his keywords tag and copying of other words from her keywords tag. Although Google doesn’t mention actual companies and doesn’t reference a specific lawsuit, the video that accompanies the blog post does mention lawsuits that involve the keywords tag and Google’s search rankings. About the keywords meta tag, Matt Cutts says:

    “It’s really not worth suing someone over because, at least for Google, we don’t use that information in our rankings even the least little bit.”

This is old news and most people know that just putting the keywords in the keyword meta tag has no effect at all, at least at Google.   I guess this confirms it!   Yet really the keyword meta tag hasnt been used for like 5 years or more and never really was that big of a factor anyway.  The Title of each page though is very important, as is having solid unique content on all pages and many links from other websites pointing to your site using the keywords in the anchor text that you want to be ranked on.

VIDEO OF MATT CUTS TALKING ABOUT KEYWORD META TAG

I saw a couple of posts today including one by Bruce Clay talking about a Google Group post by Vanessa Fox talking about the importance of the meta description tag.

"   Looking at your site in the search results, it appears that your pages would be well served by meta description tags. For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn’t found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page — in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page."

Ive always felt that the description meta tag was very valuable because of the fact that Google will use it to describe your site in the search results and it also may possibly add to your overall search score, I think it does.

Its important to see that she says that Google goes for "logical" page content but for some generic queries, they’re using the first bit of text on your page. If you don’t have a Meta data section, that first text is often your site-wide navigation and suddenly all your pages look duplicate.

Bruce Clay pointed out an important fact about duplicate content….

"By the way, the same problem with duplicate pages can happen if you do have a Description tag but you don’t bother to make it unique to the page that it’s on. Having the same Description tag on every page is duplicate content."

SO the bottom line is that its very important to have unique description meta tags on each page within your site.