Meta Tag Optimization
Meta tag optimization services have been around since the dawn of search engines. Some search engine optimization and marketing companies still think it’s what gets rankings. Should your company spend thousands of dollars to have the Meta tags on all of your pages optimized?
In the mid to late nineties, searching online was different from what we know today. There were fewer companies with online websites, and a limited amount of people with broadband or internet connections. Often times all a company would have to do was put a bunch of popular search terms into their Meta keywords tag. They were then blessed with great rankings, and lots of traffic.
This was the case because back then search engines had very limited technology. They were only able to read the meta tags that were in your code. They couldn’t read text, links, or any other of the 100’s of important elements of a website. The problem with this system was that it didn’t yield good search results.
The days of the Meta keywords are over! Not only do they serve little or no purpose in your online rankings, but they can actually hurt your rankings if you are not careful. Why are there companies selling Meta tag optimization services, and promising great results. The answer is simple, there is a lot of misinformation out there and those companies don’t understand how the search engines work now.
Some inexperienced webmasters, online marketers, and even search engine optimization companies still think that Meta tags are the end all solution. These unscrupulous search engine optimization companies may be able to feed off of the uninformed for a while, but eventually it will catch up to them. When their customers realize they are not getting the results they paid for, they will leave and then inform others.
Why don’t Meta tag optimization services work like they used to? To get the answer to this question, we will need to travel back into time. Back to the wonderful days before the big internet bubble burst. In these days, all of yahoo’s results were hand picked, and the only search engines that didn’t rely on human indexing used a Meta crawler. These simple little programs would travel the web looking for Meta keywords and descriptions. They would index this information, and results would be given by keyword relevance.
Why didn’t this work in the long run? Let’s use Paris Hilton, one of the top 10 keywords currently being searched for online, as an example. If you were to add “Paris Hilton” into your Meta keywords back in the “old days” chances are your website would show up when someone searched for that keyword. If you added it 100 times, there was a really good chance you would come up and get a lot of traffic from it.
Meta crawler would use the information that you put in your Meta keywords as a measure of relevancy. What if your site wasn’t about Paris Hilton? What if it was an ecommerce website that sold office furniture? That is the exact reason why this method does not work, because it is not relevant or reliable.
In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote a paper at Stanford about an algorithm that could be used to rank pages. Later that year they used this algorithm to start Google.com. This algorithm later became known as PageRank, and has catapulted Google to a multibillion dollar a year company. Not only does Google enjoy the majority of the search market, but they also caused Yahoo and now MSN to change their ranking system to something similar.
So do the big three search engines rely on Meta keyword tags? Titan SEO has done extensive research, and has concluded that the search engines do not put very much relevance on the Meta keyword tags at all. In fact we have found that your website can actually be penalized if you overuse certain keywords, or use the wrong keywords. The search engines will assume that you are spamming them when you use Meta tags incorrectly, and may choose to not index your page at all!
Over the years the way that search engines rank pages and websites has always changed. Their methods, formulas, and standards will continue to change as technology and bandwidth continue to improve. To formulate strategic search engine marketing solutions it is important that you keep up with the newest trends and techniques!
What the newest search news at your fingertips? Join our mailing list below: