Meta Tags are Dead

[stuart]

how true is this statement?

[John Scott]

Which engine? Which meta tags?

[stuart]

just in general really, google and intokimi mainly i guess, how much weight is placed with them? if any

[John Scott]

Inktomi places a bit of weight on the meta description tag. Not sure right off hand about the keywords tag in Ink, but I doubt it carries much weight.

In Google, meta description tag is indexed, but a page will not be ranked on the basis of words in the meta description tag alone.

[stuart]

aaah see i did wonder this, so its pretty much about content being king and well placed wording and what not then? so should place more time on the reoccurence of words in a page (not overly doing it ofcourse, so its all relevant) like for example this article posted this morning...

http://www.rwdmag.com/music_articles..._grammy_upset/

how well would that fair or whatever, i know there is page rank issues to

thanks for your time

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by stuart

aaah see i did wonder this, so its pretty much about content being king and well placed wording and what not then?

Nope - it's about links.

[stuart]

ok say for example somebody is linking to an article of yours, but like majority of time people just smash the url in really dont they, so descriptive URLS would be important and google for example can indintify the keywords and rank accordingly with it?

[I, Brian]

You're getting very warm.

[stuart]

aaaah! ok i sorta assumed it was something along these lines cause alot of high ranking sites on more specific keywords seem to have the name occurence alot so search engines do actually grab keywords from the url, example,

http://www.rwdmag.com/music_articles..._grammy_upset/

someone linking to this 50cent article would then push us up on this keyword.

sorry to babble just like to make sure, cheers

[I, Brian]

Actually, the URL is useful indirectly - it's the actual link text used that is often most important.

If you use anchor text internet marketing then you can try and use this method to rank very highly for those keywords.

However, if someone were to merely post the URL, the keywords are present in some form anyway:

http://www.internet-marketing-resear...topic4480.html

Hope this helps.

[stuart]

yar har it does, so like coz the url has occurences of the word 50 cent in my example, even though its all joined in etc etc can the search engines make sense of it and still rank the word higher

(in the even someone would use the url as the anchor text)