Meta Tags and Search Engines.
A few weeks back Jay said in one of his trainings that he no longer adds meta tags because he thinks they are redundant.
At the time I agreed, as I had not been adding tags to my posts for quite awhile. My reasoning was Google or Bing might think I was "Keyword Stuffing". I found out later that Google and other search engines had stopped crawling the keywords meta tag.
For ages I have been a subscriber to ASR (Active Search Results. it is free). Today's post in ASR made me think again. Bing and Google are not the only two search engines in the world.
While true that they don't "serve"(and I use that term loosely), the total browser market, I think after reading ASR's email that there is still some merit adding tags to posts, even though the other search engines are fighting over 5 or 6 % of the remaining browser market.
Much of it in countries where English is not the first language. See point 3.
I will just cut and paste the three points the article makes. Normally, the maximum number of tags you can add is 5.
1. To include synonyms of words that are not included in the content of your page. People search on many variations of words and phrases. Sometimes it is hard to include all of the different variations of those words in the content of your page without making your page sound like a keywords page.
2. To place emphasis on certain words. It is not always easy to place your major keywords at the top of your page or in a <h1> tag. Your major keywords might not be introduced until the middle of your page.
Using the keywords meta tag, you can add these keywords to inform the search engines that these words are important. Remember two important rules when using this tag:
When emphasizing keywords, do not place the same keyword more than two times in the keywords meta tag.
This could be considered keyword spamming and can reduce your ranking value. Also, do not place irrelevant keywords in your meta tag. Using irrelevant keywords could get your site banned from many search engines.
3. Another use for the keywords meta tag is to add words from different languages. A multi-language site with one language as its default page might want to add words from other languages to attract people speaking languages that are different than the language of the default page.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Michael.
Recent Comments
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Good pointers here friend. They all make sense. But I think most people forget about using different keywords with different languages to attract people who speak other languages as this can be crucial in getting more traffic on a wider scale. Thanks for Sharing friend. All the best!
Thanks Jeffrey,
Quite a few members in Wealthy Affiliate live in non English speaking countries as you know, so maybe this might make targeting efforts more effective.
Michael.
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Hi Mick, I have not been adding meta-tags to my posts and at one point, I was afraid it would affect my ranking.
I am yet to explore different keywords for second-language speakers of English.
Yeah, it was a bit of an eye opener for me too Dada.
Michael.