SEO Facts and Fiction...
We here at Bright White Space towers will be posting a series of articles on the muddy world of SEO, or search engine optimization to give it it’s full title, over the next couple of months. The aim of these posts is to try and clear up some myths and misconceptions which we come across from time to time.
So where do we begin, well I think we should begin with a big one – META TAGS. Or more specifically the myth surrounding the META KEYWORDS tag, If you have been involved with a website development, or a search optimization project you will no doubt of heard of Meta Tags.
Meta tags are essentially information to help describe a HTML document. They are not visible to the user, but are contained in the HTML source code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_element).
There are many different types of Meta tags, but the ones you will most likely of heard of are the ones relating to search optimisation:
META TITLE
META DESCRIPTION
META KEYWORDS
The title and description are important SEO and usability tools that should have time spent on them as they add weight to your pages and just as importantly help your visitors identify what your website is about.
So we have established the titles and descriptions are a must when setting up your pages, what about the META KEYWORDS are they important too? In a word, no!
The keywords section of your data was once upon a time a vital part of the SEO set up of a website but was subject to some serious abuse as people tried to cram it full of keywords to improve their results so now it really is not worth bothering with, why? Well simply put the search engines don’t use it so why should you, it is a waste of keystrokes!
You are much better spending your time researching your keywords and writing original, compelling key word rich content but that is for another time.
It is vital to remember that SEO is a constantly evolving form of marketing and what applied a couple of years ago does not necessarily apply now as the leading search engines are constantly improving the way they do things to make the web a bigger, better and less spammy place.
So if your SEO guru starts to tell you the importance and significance of meta keywords, you might want to question how qualified they are…