7 replies to this topic

[melvin]

Was just having a look at this website saying google does not support meta tags, so what then do u have to rely on in order for your site to have high rankings?

[ccunltd]

Melvin,

It's not that Google doesn't support meta tags. Google does not support ALL meta tags. I'm guessing your referring to the description meta tag, which I do belive Google ignores.

To answer your question, the text on your page incuding title tag, headlines, etc. In addition, Google factors in the links to your site as well.

Jim

[OysterWings]

Actually, the description meta tag is important even if some search engines do not use it in the results they return. The keyword meta tag is little used anymore for rankings - primarily, I think, because it has been abused in the past by people stuffing it with keywords unrelated to the content of the web site.

The title tag is very important to search engines. Keywords appearing within the visible content of the page and the frequency and position of the keywords on the web page are important. Having a web site where search engine spiders can easily navigate it and having links to the site from other relevant sites are also important. More about these can be found on this forum.

There is no "magic bullet" and the "rules" for a high ranking are dynamic, so learn from the insight and trial and error of others here.

[SearchRank]

Google reads meta description tags, even shows them sometimes in descriptions but the best thing you can do to rank well in Google would be to build a great informative site, the very best one for your industry and then get plenty of external links to point to it, whether that happens naturally, by your effort or both.

[melvin]

cheers clears some stuff up, thanx for the quick response too

[Nathan Malone]

The above posts are correct... Meta tags aren't the secret to high rankings, they are just a part of getting a high ranking (a very, very small part of it at that). It is quite easy to have a site rank #1 for competitive terms without having a single meta tag, though I usually include three tags: The description, keywords, and the robots meta tags.

[Scottie]

Welcome, ccunltd!

You only need a robots meta tag if you are telling robots to go away- it is an exclusion tag only.

It's a good idea to use the description and keywords tags though.

[anthonyparsons.com]

Melvin,

To ellaborate a little more, the <description> tag as such is used when Google and some others, cannot find suitable page information to display. Example, if your homepage was just a splash page with images, no content, then Google would use your description tag in the search results.

Good page content, well structured and quality inbound links are a good start to high rankings.