Baggy Posted January 27, 2010 Report Share Posted January 27, 2010 I hope this is an appropriate place to ask this question:- We have recently had a new site designed for us, as it required php and I have no knowledge of that and didn't have time to learn just now. Part of the arrangement was that we would have a CMS to allow us to work on/develop the site. To be honest, I'm not much impressed by the CMS but can manage with it (just) but one aspect does concern me. The CMS only provides limited access to the meta data. The Description and Keywords are on a site-wide basis not on a per page basis. Only the Title can be set for each page. I am concerned that this will impede SEO and limit what can be achieved in that respect. The designer says not but I'm not convinced. I appreciate this site is about web design and not SEO but I thought this is a design-related question. Would anyone be prepared to express an opinion please? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeeDev Posted January 27, 2010 Report Share Posted January 27, 2010 As far as I'm concerned, Google doesn't use Keywords meta tag at all. It completely ignores it. However I think other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN etc use Keywords meta tag (Not 100% Sure could som1 else confirm this?) Basically what you want to do is first and utmost have good page titles and description meta. Some CMS systems generate the description automatically from the page content, if your CMS does that then I think it's quite "adequate" in terms of SEO management. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amitte Posted January 27, 2010 Report Share Posted January 27, 2010 sorry BeeDev but i need to disagree on that. 1. from my knowledge google does use meta Keywords. i'll be surprised to hear otherwise (though if some one else know different i'd like to know) 2. generated description from content is more than not enough for good SEO!!! to sum it up- u paid him good money! u have to have control on those things.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PicnicTutorials Posted January 27, 2010 Report Share Posted January 27, 2010 Yes, Google completely ignores keyword metas. And, as you said, some others still use it to some degree. Although, Google WILL use your description meta in it's description it shows in the results. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lm Posted January 27, 2010 Report Share Posted January 27, 2010 (edited) I agree, per page: readable url, relevant page title, tag and good written content have more effect on SEO than meta tags. Though just in case, good CMS has dynamic metatags as well. Edited January 27, 2010 by lm Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
administrator Posted January 27, 2010 Report Share Posted January 27, 2010 I've heard different things lately about meta data ... some have said that Google does look at it a little. :/ ... Only Google really knows for sure. Since meta data can be used to cheat, there will never be that much weight put into meta information. I think thought, the description meta data can be used for display in the engine results - at least this is what I've seen in the past. As others have said, the key is in page titles and page content. Stefan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeeDev Posted January 27, 2010 Report Share Posted January 27, 2010 (edited) Aye, Meta tags aren't as important now as they were few years ago. Google now uses lots of different aspects to rank your pages rather than just simply meta description and title tags (Although they play an important role and thus should not be neglected!) It's good to have well structured content with H1 tag (Only one per page, other headings can use H2 and H3 etc...) and also having inbound links from well ranked pages will boost your search engine ranking. The more quality inbound links the better ranking. However Duplicated Meta tags (Title and Description) across your pages, or duplicated content across different domains may and will compromise your rank. Edited January 27, 2010 by BeeDev Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baggy Posted January 28, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 28, 2010 Thanks for the replies folks - appreciated. I recognise that Google doesn't look at keywords any more (or so they say), yet everything one reads about SEO still refers to keywords, so I think we ignore them at our peril. However, Beedev's comment about duplication is of some concern. As I mentioned, in the cms we can set a page name (title) and page title prefix (description) for each page but not keywords, which are site-wide. As Yahoo, MSN (Bing) and others still use keywords, I guess this will be limiting. Anyway, I am working on getting Directory Site listings where I can, as these are the only feasible links in the short-term for a new site. We will see how the rankings go over time. Thanks again for the input. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
virtual Posted January 28, 2010 Report Share Posted January 28, 2010 I was going to add don't forget the importance of backlinks, but BeeDev already mentioned it. Google also often changes its ranking parameters just to confuse the issue. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baggy Posted February 11, 2010 Author Report Share Posted February 11, 2010 Can I re-open this with another related question please? (if it should be posted fresh or elsewhere please put me straight) I am keen to try SEO on a couple of our sites to boost their traffic in the short-term (hopefully), whilst continuing to work on organic improvements over the longer term. However, we have had our fingers burned more than once with our websites and I wish to avoid a repeat experience with SEO. Can anyone suggest how/where we find a) genuine competence (i.e. proven track record) and fair value? Any/all advice will be much appreciated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
virtual Posted February 11, 2010 Report Share Posted February 11, 2010 However, we have had our fingers burned more than once with our websites and I wish to avoid a repeat experience with SEO. Can anyone suggest how/where we find a) genuine competence (i.e. proven track record) and fair value? Any/all advice will be much appreciated. A while ago, I looked over a course at lynda dot com http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourse.aspx?lpk2=209 that seemed quite promising. I just checked back on it and it was written in 2006, so it's probably totally out of date, but you might get some ideas from it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
falkencreative Posted February 11, 2010 Report Share Posted February 11, 2010 Thought I should post this, since there seemed to be some disagreement about whether Google uses keywords or not in determining search engine ranking. Straight from Google -- they don't. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baggy Posted February 11, 2010 Author Report Share Posted February 11, 2010 Thanks for the responses. I don't believe I expressed myself clearly enough - I would like to find someone to do this work for us, rather than try to do it all myself. I have achieved some modest success but it is clear to me that it needs a lot more knowledge/expertise than I have, to make any significant progress with SEO. If our sites cannot be 'made' to achieve good results in the search engines, we are left with paying through Google Adwords, which gets rather expensive. It occurs to me that it might be better economics to pay an expert to improve our organic rankings rather than continue to sink money into Adwords. Hence my earlier questions - who/where? Any thoughts folks? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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