Meta Tags (limitations)

[SLP-NYCT]

I know we have a limit on how many characters we can put in a meta tag. Is this due to search engine restrictions or template limitations? I see some companies have huge meta tag fields and others do not.

Are long meta tags bad for ranking? I would think the more I can put in there, the better.

[RESteve]

I don't think meta tags are nearly as important as they were, say 5 years ago. Meta description is still vital - due to it sometimes being shown underneath your link in the search results. I find it helps with conversion ratios (click through ratios).

But keywords - *shrug* - I've found that search engines are much smarter these days with their spiders. They can crawl your content, get keyword densities, and overall learn what the page is about without you explicitly writing our your meta keywords.

[AnnAnderson1015]

How about repeating the same meta pages for each post/page, is that ok?

[RESteve]

Having unique descriptions is always a good thing - I even think it's mentioned in Google's guidelines.

I would create meta tags on a case-by-case basis, and spend the time (tedious, I know) writing out pertinent keywords and descriptions for each page/blog post your write.

[jamesww]

I think the keyword meta tag has gone by the way side as I have not seen any benefit to ranking for a term included ahead of going with out the keyword. My studies show that Title and Description tags still have importance in ranking and I have noticed that it is to your detrement to have duplicate tags across your site.

[buildingNUT]

Yeah, Google has even talked about Meta tags being almost worthless because of the way websites are crawled now. Even though they may not help your searches, i think they are still somewhat helpful within the site itself for internal searches.

[RonnieG]

Whether or not they are still important to SEs may be debatable. I happen to believe from my own experience that the Title and Description metas still have some importance to the SEs, even if just as a cross-check on how they have interpreted the page content. To that extent, I think the SEs may award "bonus points" for pages whose Title and Description metas do closely match the page content. But regardless of how the SEs look at them, since they show up on the SERP results as seen by consumers, how well you write your Title and Description metas can be critical to whether or not a consumer will pick your SERP result over others on the same page.

[GreggRio]

I would agree with Ron on the title and descriptions having relevance for SE's, but think it also as a sales pitch place for the consumer. Notice in your searches what gets highlighted in your results and that of competitors. When they read it, does it meet what their search indicated they wanted, or does it give some interesting or different information they may want, I.e., map search, long tail items? If you have cms 2 you can see what the search result was that brought the customer to register and that can be interesting to note as well.

[Alex K]

META Title is widely accepted as one of the most important factors in your SEO efforts, so I'd recommend paying special attention to it. I've seen estimates of length in range of 60-90 characters. And keywords order in the title matters, so it is generally a good idea to put your company name at the end, if at all [if your company name is also the name of your domain - no need to put it in the title - you'd be up there at the top for your company name if it is also your domain].

As for keywords and description, Google doesn't care, but Yahoo admits to reading them, and recommends the length at 256 characters [Yahoo website building software actually limits the length of those to 256 chars].

As mentioned above, description is what your customer will see in SERPs - and we know that first impression is important . It also seems that majority of search engines cuts the description at a 256 chars limit, so it is a question of having short, to the point text, or something longer that will end mid-word with ...

And META keywords, for Google it doesn't matter, but Yahoo, in article titled: "How do I improve the ranking of my web site in the search results?" puts this: "

Use a "keyword" meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.

Self-explaining. I know that many people are guilty of Google-love , but think about it, even if Google has 85-90% of market in some countries, would you not like that 10-15% of possible customers using other search engines to come to your site because you also rank high in something more than Google?