Meta Keywords

[roy]

With the recommendation that the Keywords MetaTag should contain a limited number of words what is the best way to manage a localised service?

For example: A plumber that covers the North East. His Key phrases that he might target could be be Plumber Newcastle, Plumber Gateshead, Plumber Sunderland, Plumber Jarrow... etc.

Listing in that way, and then using the same phrases in the page content, seems to tick all the boxes for SEO but the MetaTag may be ignored or penalised because of length. So would this give the same results...

Plumber, Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland, Jarrow.

Or is there a better way?

[Bill Deakin]

I realy wouldn't spend much time on your keyword tag if I were you, it's all but redundant now. It is now only used by one major search engine, Inktomi, and of no use to your efforts to rank well in Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc.

[fisicx]

I think yahoo still use keywords but the amount of traffic doesn't really warrant the effort required to write keywords for each page on the site.

[roy]

Sorry folks,

Should have looked down throught the past posts before asking this question as I see it has been covered well previously.

So if the the Meta Keywords are now redundant how should this be handled within the Meta Description and general content to avoid keyword spamming?

I guess registering the business with Google for inclusion with the maps would be helpful and a localised keyword PPC campaign too.

Any other suggestions?

[fisicx]

The meta description is used as part of the snippet the search engine displays in the search results. It has very little SEO effect but can provide a marketing hook for people searching for a particular item or service.

If you write a SE friendly page title and back this up with a sales pitch in your description you may well see an increase in your visitor numbers. It follows therefore that adding your USP, phone number. location etc in the description is a positive move. But do not use the same description for every page.

The key therefore is the page title and on-page content - this will improve your ranking. The description will increase your visitor numbers.

As always, write your pages for people not search engines.

[bermuda]

Among the meta tags that are just very important, are the title plus description tags. They still are visited by the search engines and are important for websites rankings.

[fisicx]

Sorry, bermuda you are not quite correct.

The page title is very important for ranking, it is however not a metatag, just part of the document head.

The metatags themselves have just about zero SEO benefit. There may be a 0.001% benefit of including the keywords metatag for indexing by yahoo but there is no SEO advantage in producing descriptions. What the description can do however is entice people to click on your listing in the SERPs.

It's not just me saying this. 5 minutes research will give you same same answer I have.

[bermuda]

Yeah ficix, I agree. I was actually saying the same matter you are referring to but expressed that in a hurry and through meta tags terms. Indeed, meta tags are not important because the era of meta search engines is gone.

I too was about to say that only title and description parts of a website are important. Title for the search engines which is correctly a part of the headings and description, for better displaying the page details in the search engines listings.

[Arleigh]

Although meta tags are not much that important, I still use to include it. There's nothing wrong with using that.

And I agreed that Title is really important factor in on-page optimization because it's helpful for your site to increase its search engine rankings.

[erikko]

they still matters most specially if your site is using adwords