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Search Engines and HTML Meta Tags

2010-05-23

A few days ago one of my clients (I've created their website) called me regarding supposed improvements of their website. One of the desired additions was the inclusion of a rather long series of meta keywords. Basically she is trying to get a better page rank on Google.

Here is why keywords are nowadays pretty much useless.

keywords used to be a handy tool, but that changed a few years ago. Back in the nineties all major search engines were taking keywords into account when indexing HTML pages. Unfortunately a lot of people misused this feature by including a lot of keywords unrelated to the website at hand in order generate more traffic.

This behavior lead to a decrease in quality of the search results. The logical reaction of the search engines was to start ignoring these tags. That said, there are other meta tags - such as description - still relevant today.

You might want to have a look at a post on Google Webmaster Central to corroborate my post.

In case you need a quick reminder how meta tags work and how to incorporate them into your website, take a look at the following piece of code:

There are plenty of other things you can do, besides meta tags to get a better page rank. The following three items are just a few of those:

Make your site fast. It is true, that Google assigns a better page rank to faster websites. Obviously there's large variety of ways to achieve this. For example you might want to consider using a content delivery network (=geographically distributed servers mirroring your website to reduce load times).
Don't use Flash. Google does index the content of Flash sites. However, there are a few limitations to be aware of. Details vary from case to case.
Don't use images to display text. There are those designers that like to use images instead of HTML tags. Especially headline tags such as h1 are often replaced with images. The images may me nice looking, but cannot be indexed by Google.