Reflecting on The Basics – Meta Tags

As we began this year, I reflect on things that I do in my everyday. Am I making the most of my time as an online marketer? Do I meet my own expectations? So, wanting to be awesome, I decided that I should really figure out this whole online thing. Just like a coach teaching a new team would do, I am covering the basics. Trying to figure out what I am doing with my time I looked into the basics of working in an online market. Here are some of the sites I looked at and what I liked about the pages. Maybe it will help you, seeing as everyone (and their cat) has a web site now…

http://www.webmarketingnow.com/tips/meta-tags-uncovered.html
Do’s and don’ts of using meta tags. It also gives a description of the top 20 tags used frequently. The author (Jerry West) recommends the use of four basic tags: content, content type, content description, and language. Not recommended are tags that have no real impact on the quality of the site page (e.g. meta expires, meta rating, meta robots, and meta set cookie).

http://www.highrankings.com/seo-trends?utm_source=feedburner
Site offering statistics related to search engine ranking algorithms and the associated change year over year of the SEO industry accepted practices. The importance of keywords is not important but may SEO’s and users, think it is.

http://www.twresourcegroup.com/pubcon-day-3-content-creation-topics-and-search/
Take away from PubCon from one marketing company concerning meta tags as having little to no impact in ranking. “Meta tags are not a factor in Google’s algorithm and are not even looked at.”

http://www.pubcon.com/search/search.cgi
Search PubCon’s database of info.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812
What tags Google actually looks at and/or uses if they contain quality data as it relates to the web page. These tags are mainly just technical information.

http://searchenginewatch.com/2167931
This article dispels myths and beliefs about meta tags and data. In summary, the only tags to concern one’s self with are the meta robots (use only when removing a page from index), meta description and meta keywords (only read by a few crawlers now).

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
Specifying links or pages that have duplicate content.