Hello All,

I am a new member to the forum but have been a SEW subscriber for years. A new client of mine wants me to use 2 keywords that I have never used before and am leary of bad usage. They are name=Association and name=htdig-keywords. He wants me to use them in conjunction with the META KEYWORD and META DESCRIPTION tags.

Here's what they look like:

<meta name="Keywords" CONTENT="We buy houses, Sell my house fast, sell a house Colorado Springs, need to sell a house, Pueblo West, and Pueblo. Selling a house, Colorado springs, Pueblo, Pueblo West, Cash for houses, we buy homes, quick cash for houses, we buy ugly houses, Western Home Buyers, real home solutions ">
<meta name="htdig-keywords" CONTENT="We Buy Houses, sell my Colorado Springs house fast, buy homes, buy houses, cash house, sell house fast, sell house fast in Colorado springs, Pueblo West, Pueblo, sell a house, need to sell a house, we buy homes, we buy houses, buy ugly house, sell real estate, quick home sale, estate sale, no agents, no fees, no commissions, we buy houses, Colorado Springs, Pueblo West, Pueblo, Colorado, buy home cash, buy house cash, sale by owner, cash fast house, buy my house, cash, selling a house, buy ugly houses, buy house for cash, stop foreclosure, foreclosure, pay cash for house, cash house sell, house must sell, quick house sale, quick home sale, sell house now, house quickly sell, home must sell, buy cash home, southern Colorado, apartment buildings, land, notes">
<meta name="description" content="Western Home Buyers will buy your house or property in any condition, We pay cash for your equity. If you need to sell your house fast, Western Home Buyers will workout a solution that best fits your needs. Cash Offers For Houses often within 24 hours, Sell my house fast, We buy houses in Colorado Springs, Pueblo West, and Pueblo">
<meta name="classification" CONTENT="Buy Houses, Sell Houses, Home, Cash for House, Homes, Houses, Buy Homes, Real Estate, Quick Cash for Homes, Sell Home Fast, Property, Real Estate, Colorado Springs, Pueblo West, Pueblo">
<meta name="robots" CONTENT="all=index,follow">

SO SORRY FOR THE LENGTH, I just wanted you to see what he initially sent me. Thanks for any help!

Karen
aka janewest

Okay the person actually wants two new meta tags - let's not have keywords used here to avoid confusion.

I have not heard of these but am going to test and see if there is a boost of any kind... though I doubt it.... the fact that he is stacking the meta tags shows there is a bunch of work being done for nothing....

Title tag yes
Keywords - okay but not really a factor.
Description is good for what gets displayed in SERPs
robots.txt file okay... follow,index okay... refresh okay though really unneccessary

Ok. I'll keep this one simple.

Never duplicate meta information. If you find yourself putting the same information into multiple metatags, then you are probably spamming, or at the very least wasting your time.

If everyone followed this simple rule, a lot of wasted time and bandwidth would be eliminated.

In this case, the extra tags appear to have no use other than to stuff more keywords into the code. Bad.

Finally, and for the record, I did some misspelling research a short while ago and tested a ton of different techniques, some of which I would not practice myself, but I wanted to test anyway.

Two of the techniques involved metatags. One was putting the misspellings in the keywords metatag, and the other was inventing a completely new metatag.

The keywords one was ignored by Google, and barely looked at by MSN and Yahoo. The invented metatag was completely ignored by all the search engines (so was the dublin core tag, BTW).

The only reason that I can think of for the htdig one would be if you had a custom internal search engine that did not, for some reason, read the keywords or description metatag, which is highly unlikely.

It's a waste of time. I'd call it spam, except since it won't work at all, I don't think it even deserves that title.

If he insists, fine (it will be ignored). But tell him not to expect any improvements in rankings, and to be prepared for more hand evaluations than normal.

Having your taxes audited isn't a bad thing if you are not cheating on your taxes, but why invite it? Being hand evaluated because competitors are sending in spam reports isn't a bad thing if you are not spamming, but why invite it?

In short, there is no benefit, it takes away valuable time and bandwidth/download speed, and there is a potential risk. A simple cost/benefit analysis says it's a bad idea.

My opinion,

Ian

Just as I thought. I really appreciate your responses!

Karen

Meta tags are so 90's. It use depends on who you ask.

For SEO many agree that the only probably needed with most SEs are the keyword and description meta tags.

However, if you need to use third-party accessibility and validation services, (HTML, XHTML, etc) some of these services require the classification, target and archive meta tags, even other obscure tags. In addition educational sites that have these tags as requirement in their architecture will appreciate its use. If you want one of your documents to be indexed by these, it makes sense to use the extra tags.

These tags and other invented by users play no role for ranking purposes and won't hurt either. At least that's my experience.

I have been using these and others all the time and for many years now with no risk in the rankings for my intented keyword.

Orion

Hi

Some great posts but here's my small addition.

A new client of mine is also using a friend to do his seo and he's asked me to take a look.

My initial thoughts are not good.

He's using the description and keywords meta tag (same keywords stuffed into both) but he's also followed these by using the meta http-equiv e.g.:

<meta http-equiv="blah blah keywords keywords" content="blah blah keywords keywords" />

By the sounds of it it's 1. probably not even going to be read by the engines 2. Keyword stuffing which could / will look bad if spotted 3. A waste of his time.

Is this what you think?

Cheers

Hi

Some great posts but here's my small addition.

A new client of mine is also using a friend to do his seo and he's asked me to take a look.

My initial thoughts are not good.

He's using the description and keywords meta tag (same keywords stuffed into both) but he's also followed these by using the meta http-equiv e.g.:

<meta http-equiv="blah blah keywords keywords" content="blah blah keywords keywords" />

By the sounds of it it's 1. probably not even going to be read by the engines 2. Keyword stuffing which could / will look bad if spotted 3. A waste of his time.

Is this what you think?

Cheers

At best a waste of time.... if the quality police see it it could be misconstrued... to them it may be a flag and then they look at everything else with more scrutiny

Cheers....my suspicions were correct. ;)

Just as I thought. I really appreciate your responses!

Karen
Thanks so much for your suggestions and and thoughts concerning Meta tags! I have passed on your concerns and suggestions to my client and we are now being found on google!

I made some major changes to the HTML with regard to ALT tags, TITLE and of course META KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION, as per the SearchengineWatch forum. As a web designer I am very pleased with the results. BTW I made the changes and allowed the se bots and crawlers to do the rest; it took about a couple of months - I made the changes mid-May.

Not sure about other search engines, but at least this is a start.

Your original meta description (in the post at the top of this thread) described what the business does, and as such I suspect you have the same meta description on every page.

The meta description should be used to describe what is on THAT page, and should therefore be different on every page. To not do so will cause you a lot of problems along the track.