[thelist] Importance of Keywords, Description

Simon Willison simon at incutio.com
Wed Aug 14 07:26:28 CDT 2002


At 11:56 14/08/2002 +0500, Syed Zeeshan Haider wrote:
>I have more than a hundred web pages of an under-construction web site
>on my hard drive. All of them have same keywords and description in
><meta> tags. I was thinking about changing them according to the page
>content, which is quite cumbersome for such large number of pages.
>Before doing all this, I want to know that:
>What is the importance of keywords and description in <meta> tags for
>the search engines?
>To what extent search engines depend on keywords and description in
><meta> tags while searching?

IANASEO[0] but as far as I know most search engines ignore these completely
- they have been abused so much in the past (people putting irrelevant
terms in there to increase their rankings and other silly tricks) that the
majority of search engines don't even notice them any more. They definitely
have no effect on Google.

The meta description tag is used by some non-search engine tools. As an
example, I am a Dmoz editor and the Dmoz "add URL" wizard takes a URL and
grabs the meta description (if it exists) as a suggested description for
the page, although I tend to edit these any way.

On the whole though it isn't really worth going overboard with keywords and
descriptions - they aren't nearly as important now as they were a few years
ago (especially with Google taking the lead as the most used search
engine). They're nice to have but definitely not essential.

Regards,

Simon Willison
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/
[0] I Am Not A Search Engine Optimizer








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