Avoiding Meta Tag Spam Is Critical To Your Sites Success
This is a multi part series on proper SEO usage of Meta Data. First to those who may not be familiar with meta tags and their definition we will give a quick overview. Wikipedia describes meta tags as “data about data”. Essentially meta tags such as the “description” and “keyword” tags are used to describe the information that may be found within the content of the specific page on your website.
For example the description tag gives an overview of the information provided on the page. The description for this page will most likely read similar to:
Provides details on correct use of meta tags to avoid search engine spam and over optimization of the description and keyword meta data.
Essentially giving the “cliff notes” if you will of the pages content.
How Meta Data Can Be Used As Spam
Years ago keyword density (the percentage of the number of times a keyword is found on a page) was one of the recognized ways to obtain top search engine ranking. Also known as “Keyword Spam” webmasters and SEO’s would pack as many keywords as they could into a site in order to achieve top search engine position.
In fact just recently we had a client where an SEO company (even to this day) had keyword spammed the clients site with over 80 distinct key phrases (not just words) packed into the description, title, and keyword tags. They each duplicated each other. Needless to say this is completely against Google’s Terms of Service and is just asking for a penalty or complete removal from their Index.
Correctly learning what is and isn’t acceptable is good for those who are using an SEO company so that they can keep that company in check with their practices as well for those who are optimizing their sites themselves in order to keep themselves in check. It helps to avoid the pitfalls that you may see others doing. We believe in building for long term search engine viability. What we recommend will be to achieve those goals specifically.
Proper Use Of Meta Data For Search Engine Optimization
There are only a couple of Meta Tags, when talking about SEO, in which we will look at specifically in this series. They are the Title Tags, Description Tags, and Keyword Tags. Keyword tags, as evidence is showing over and over, is a Meta tag that is being ignored more and more by search engines such as Google. So while it can still be incorporated into your site, how you use it is critical.
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