To META or Not to META that is the question?

I recently met with a fellow who is a P.H.D. graphic instructor at a local university, who has agreed to help me review the website I work for and help us make some changes. The guy is very sharp and a graphic guru. But I was very surprised when he made a comment about meta tags. I stopped him almost in mid sentence, "you still use meta tags?"  I went on to inform him that Google ignores meta data and has for many years. He replied he likes to cover all the bases. Yes, I replied I don't delete meta data that is already there, however I don't really spend much time on it anymore. We went on to talk about Yahoo, Bing and other search engines such as Opera that still may look at meta tags.

He went on to tell me that the business marketing department of the university would be the people to ask about search engine optimization (SEO) managment.

So the question of what to do with the meta tag fields still seems to be a question that all the experts still do not agree on.

Let me back up just a little for the readers that don't know the history of meta data and Google, without going into too much detail. Back in the dark ages, maybe 10 years ago, and before the search engine monopoly "Google" (all powerful one) made some changes. Meta tags were a useful hidden field on a website that helped search engines find out what a website was about. It was a field where a webmaster could put keywords and information that would help describe to a person who was searching for something what was in the website. So if you were looking for "books about dogs", and a site had "books about dogs" in the meta data you would find the site. This all seems very helpful and it was until one day when some crafty webmaster who was not getting any search results found out that we can put just about anything we want in this field even if it was not accurate. So after people started manipulating meta data for search result placement Google caught on and started ignoring the field.

So one might ask how does Google find a site that you are looking for now days? They use Robots! Well kinda, Google does not give away all their secrets on how they rank and find websites and content, because if they did it would be too easy to trick them, and they keep changing to stay ahead of crafty webmasters who try and manipulate the results. There are two things that S.E.O. people do know about search results placement; one content is king, that's where the robots come in, and two who is your site linked to.

Keywords is the new Meta.

If a website is setup correctly, Google will actually work, and if you sell books about dogs, people who search for books about dogs will find you.

How do you setup a website correctly so people can find your product or service? Very carefully, It needs to be done right from the very start. The two things mentioned before, content and links should be in the fore-front of design from the very start. If you keep content and keywords in mind while you are building a site you will end up with much better results from Google. I will go into more on keywords and links in my next blogs.

To sum up meta data, and meta tags, if you have the time, go ahead and put in relevant info in these fields it won't hurt much other than the time it takes to add to your page load times, which in most cases is minimal, and it might help with Yahoo and Bing. But if time is an issue, because if you are like me and spend all day entering data on webstores and you just don't have time to mess with it, err to titles and keywords where your time will be better spent. I look at it like this, when I look at my Google analytics I get thousands of hits a month from Google organic search results and tens of results from Yahoo and Bing, so when I plan my days I use my time trying to figure out what  Google (all powerful one) wants, and when I have time leftover, which has not happened yet I spend time on what Yahoo and Bing wants.