Meta Tag site dispute !!!! help

#1 11-01-2005

My firend has been advised by her web design company that META TAGS are not needed for her site at all. Infact this is all that is contained in her header -
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>Amaison</title>
<base href="http://www.amaison.co.uk/">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="stylesheet.css">
</head>

She has had no business from her site and it is a disaster for her. I used to do work for her, but retired from the workforce last year to have my child...I am helping her with this as a friend.

I am extremely worried about her stats....no one is visiting...although they are telling her yehhh...you got 48 hit today....I am sure these are spidersnot people visiting...have a look.... (http://www.amaison.co.uk/sitestats/).

this is what the company had to say.....

About the meta tags: I've had lengthy discussions with ***** from *****. He's one of the best internet marketeers in the world. If you want to generate huge amounts of traffic to your site, he's your man. He kindly took a look at your site and made a few suggestions.

Search engines, and the way in which they rank your site, have changed a lot over the years. Although, the traditional method of researching keyword popularity has not changed, just the way in which they are implemented. Meta tags are no longer used by search engines as site owners were placing irrelevant but very popular keywords into the meta tags in an attempt to increase ranking. This was seen by Google as detrimental to the integrity of search results. So Google implemented another method, the Page Content Index. This method uses the text on each page of your website as keywords. Google, MSN, and all search engines now use this method as it provides search results far more relevant than the meta tag method.

What ***** suggests doing is going through the product descriptions on your website and re-writing them to include more of the keywords you want people to find your site by. I also showed ***** your Site Stats (http://www.amaison.co.uk/sitestats/). After looking carefully at the statistics, ***** was quite surprised to see so many visits, around 40 visits a day. So people aren't having a problem finding your site. Increasing visitors would never hurt a website, but ****** suggests the problem is elsewhere. Advertising a couple of special offers on the home-page always attracts attention. That might be an option.

......PLease guys from one retired mummy web designer to the next(need your helpfeel a bit out of it). Can you help my friend. I hate seeing people getting ripped off or fobbed off because they are not very technical...she need help. I need help to fight her corner.

Any and all comments wanted...please email me.

Jill Whalen · #2 11-01-2005

Yep, that's right. Meta tags definitely are not needed as they won't help to get the site found in the search engines for keyword phrases that are important to the site.

However, that site does need good keyword-rich Title tags. (Those are not Meta tags.) If the person she contacted didn't tell her that, then that person obviously doesn't know much about SEO.

mdmc95 · #3 11-02-2005

Hi - META tags may not be NEEDED but they do no HARM - in fact, if memory serves me right, there is soem "historical" forum entries pointing to the fact that the HTTP-EQUIV="CHARSET", name="Generator" & name="PROGID" (???) that are useful.

That aside, I've taken a quick look at your site and IMHO the main thing that strikes me is the laclk of content that the search engines can refer to. Your friend is selling some very nice stuff but where's the (unique) descriptions, supporting articles, internal & external links? (I have a feeling you're restricted by the shopping cart format you've choosen)

You'll find a huge number of home made sites with awful code that do well in SERPS coz of plain old good CONTENT. Tell people about what you're selling first - blend that with basic SEO and you should have improvements.

This MAY mean creating "Showroom Pages" that are not part of the Shopping Cart so you're not restrained by that format BUT are linked directly to each product's "buy" page in the shopping cart - so people can purchase.

The rule of thumb I work to is that the search engines are trying to give their customers the best information regarding a particular search term - you give the search engines that information and back it up with authoritive links chances are you'll get traffic.

I've jumped around a bit on this but I hope you get my drift - LOL --- It's been 23 years since I've been to East Kilbride - went to see Roxy Music on their last tour playing in Glasgow!

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