I guess the first thing I wanted to say, and I might have missed it in the comments, is that I've noticed google does whatever they want. I do use Meta across the board. Title, description, keywords and such. I've found through research, the old fashion kind, that google uses what ever it deems fit.

In short, even when I use meta discription tags, google still finds it own snippet to display with my Title tag on the serps....except for my home page.???

Anyone know how to save meta discription but suppress its use in wordpress? Anyone want to create a plugin, if I sponser it? Or maybe one exists.

This is a great post, seriously I've been here over 45 minutes reading. There is much debate. And I've noticed that listening to the EXPERTS via SMX or whatever is about as productive as reading SEO articles on Ezine. com , know what I mean?

anyway, thats my 2 cents.

Thanks,

Joe @ Mi Small Biz SEO

Have u tried All in One SEO?

@Mi Small Business Seo: Thanks Joe for sharing your experience and feedback.

Great post once again, I think I'm going to remove the meta keywords and see how it goes.

@Jonathan Budd Review: Thanks - do let us know how that works for you.

I totally understand that meta tags have very little effect for SEO but still some of the websites that have top rankings have meta tags. I have top ranking for some keywords so I am afraid that if I remove it I will loose a little SEO juice..... So I kind of think it is still a little bit of risk to remove it right now. Just my opinion.

It can a little, but if you want my personal opinion using a table structure is not the most effective structure as far as SEO is concerned.

Great article.Few people says that metatags really hurts but few say they really help us.I have seen still many high authority websites are using meta tags..

How great
Definitely some inspiring stuff and sharing here
Thanks for the article.

Most certainly going to put this to the test by removing meta tags from one site and monitor the traffic...Thanks for a wonderful post.

Yeah .. right... less the tags will be there in the description of your site... more the visitors will attract there as it is an alrithm of Google,,..else it will be be considered under spammig condition if you add more tags in the description... so be updated and use less tags... and enjoy the best traffic ahead..

Interesting post; never heard of this technique before. I'll need to do some due diligence in the testing and analyzing department.

Thanks for the heads up on meta tags i will try removing them and apply split testing to realize the results.Very informative article...Thanks

Nicolas,

As promised here is a detailed report. If you remember a month ago I took your advice and took the Meta Data information out of my website. Remember my position in Google at the time was #12. After making the changes with Google in mind I was surprised to find that I made the front page of Yahoo for my keyword which they have never given me any positioning before.

Then I posted that I didn't like the description that Google was choosing for my website in the absence of the Meta Data and felt like I would lose sales because of it. For two weeks I left the no meta data website alone and found that while I am accustomed to getting 14+ sales of my product that during that time frame my sales fell to 8.

For the remaining 2 weeks I added the Meta Data information back to the website and a strange thing happened, here is where I stand right now for my keyword in the SE's:

Google = #3
MSN = #2
Yahoo = #3
Live = #2
Ask = #3
AOL = #3

While I don't understand why my website climbed the SE's once I removed the the meta data and I don't understand why it continued to climb once I put them back I do know for a fact that I can't live on the earnings I made with the meta data remove.

Paul

Hi Paul,

Thank you for keeping us posted with your progress. There are many variable when it comes to Search engine ranking and your description is not part of it.

However, depending on the traffic you are targeting, the appearance of your description can have impact on your conversion, but that's another issue.

Not having a meta description is particularly effective for long tail keywords search that your content is not initially prepared for specifically. I gives you much more diversity and relevancy than a single description.

However it all can depend on your page, if you sole objective is only to get traffic from your main keyword, then writing a description ad style for this keyword only will increase your conversion for this term only provided you have sufficient ranking already.

Anyway, congratulation on your top rankings!

Thanks for the tips, I never thought that meta tags could be hurting my sites, I'll try removing them from 1 site and see what happens

It doesn't hurt per say, but depending of your optimization and traffic generation strategy, you can find some hidden benefits of not having them, especially for long tail searches.

This really shows how important it is to read newer content on the Internet. I just added my meta tag yesterday, but now I am going to remove it, just in case. Shouldn't Internet content have a shelf-life or something? Probably not a safe bet if I actually needed archived info. :) Excellent post!! Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

What you said is very true Shalini, especially when it comes to SEO, the rules and algorithms are ever changing and unless you upate yourself you could be making some serious mistakes.

Too many people talk or write about SEO, even today, but don't have a clue and just repeat what they heard or what they read from a SEO book (which may have be a great one), but happened to be totally outdated.

Considering how fiercer Google is becoming, the danger of doing the wrong thing when applying SEO is not just to don't benefit from it, but can potentially harm you.

For example in Google, now an excess of keyword density will get you penalized for over-optimization and could cost you anywhere between 200 to 950 places in your ranking!

wow great post it was probably one of the best articles i have ever read it displayed a keen sense of knowledge you certainly outdid yourself in this post i did learn many important concepts

Thank you Almir, if you keep saying this kind of things on all my posts you are going to make me blush! :)

Seriously, I'm glad that you find this article useful and really appreciate your feedback.

I never thought about the "Meta Description" I am now going to have to go through over 200+ posts and do the meta description. Thanks for sharing this information.

200+ May sounds like a lot of work (and it certainly is) but better get done with it now, than waiting for you to have 2,000+ to change!

You really have to optimize your content more, in order for Google to pick the right part of your page to add in as a description. I guess my fear is that Google will pick words off my site that have nothing to do with the article, and include them into the description. Granted, someone would hit my page at that point, but may not get what they are asking for.

For example, when you go to sites that pull up part of your last article in a feed snippet, and end up pulling the "Share this" links instead of the main text. So now someone searching for a Facebook article may see mine just because I have a "Share this on Facebook" link at the bottom of my post about cats or something unrelated. I hope that makes sense.

Nonetheless, useful information. I will do my best to wean myself off of meta descriptions and tags.

~ Kristi

No matter how improved it is, a bot is still just a bot... it's bound to have some mistakes from time to time, but as a general rule, Google will always try its best to provide what is the most relevant to the search query, usually taking 2 snippet of your content with the words used in the search query (which is why it tends to make the description more relevant)

Hi..
Firstly i want to say that thanks to sharing this great post.i have not a more knowledge about SEO.but i used meta tags and keywords for on page optimization.Your advice is right to get the good result and more profit.i will follow all your great tips.nice guest post dear..

I'm glad that you find the tips useful, what I would like to add, is more than just taking action on them, it would definitely be an advantage for you to also "understand" the reason why it is so. You'll see that there's a certain pattern to the evolution and changes that are made, and clearer understanding can help you anticipate the ones forthcoming.

seo always change and need time to get the result.....but,thanks for sharing the tips

This is why it's interesting to observe and try to anticipate the trend, and at the very least always stay on the right side so that if you don't benefit from the change, at least you won't get hurt by them!

useful advice about heywords targeting for getting more profit

The advices may be good, but they are of no value if we don't put them in practice!

Hi Peter,

Wow, seems to be a real serious debate here about meta tags. For what I know the traffic you are looking for depends whats the aim of your site. If you have a MFA site you dont care much about being targeted, you may need to focus in short hig traffic keywords, you really dont want people stay too much in your site, you make money when they click away using your Adsense, therefore to make money from a niche site you need lots of traffic and if they are not fully targeted you dont care because then you may have a lot of chances that they click in your PPCs.
But in the other hand If you want traffic for a blog like this one or a static page that is only a squeeze page or a sales page then less traffic but fully targeted can be better to obtain your subscription or the sale.

I think they maybe both right in some way.

Hope they will not hit against me now, lol.

The advices I give to people are aimed towards people who wants to build a genuine site in order to provide real visitor satisfaction. I'm in no way encouraging or helping people engaged in "hit and run" techniques, or providing rubbish content to get some Adsense clicks.

I'm personally dedicated to fight against those kind of sites. (I'm not trying to hit against you, just stating facts)

So yes, all what I say is aimed at building a better quality website not an automated Adsense targeted website.

Yeah Peter I am glad you highlighted that meta tags are no longer useful in terms of SEO anymore. Many are still spamming it unknowingly. By the way, I think you are doing well in this aspect, so thumbs up for you!

@Ben Pei: Ben, This is a guest post by Nicolas Prudhon if you didn' realise so credit goes to him for writing this excellent post.

Thanks Peter, but I wouldn't be here without your invitation :)

Hi Nicolas,

Thank you for this great post and thank you to Peter Lee for directing me to it. This whole new approach has made me re-think my strategy alltogether and certainly in the short term I am going to drop my meta description to see what happens. I have also taken on board your keyword advice and will probably do the same.

Thanks again for the post, I look forwrd to reading others in the future,

regards,

Mal.

Thank you Mal, your feedback is much appreciated!

oh i was giving to much credit to peter for this i thought it was him that wrote this than i read his comment that it was you that wrote it i enjoyed this blog, i never used seo tags or any description because i didn't think they were necessary i'm glad that i didn't fill that stuff in because i probably would have lost traffic because of it

@Nicolas: Another great post from you. I would disagree with you partially. I don't think meta description is bad at all. Search engines are smart enough to choose the right phrases and existence of meta description doesn't mean SEs would suddenly become dumb and only show meta description for all queries. You can test it yourself.

Hi Jeet, thank you for your feedback!

Unfortunately, I'm afraid that search engines are very smart for certain things, but not that smart for others...

Anyway, the concern is that if you don't put your meta description, Google will pick one for you. If you make a meta description, and Google doesn't like it, it will still make one for you.

To some extend, why should you bother then?

I appreciate and respect everyone's views and opinions, and I'm glad in fact that we can't all agree, that makes this post all the more valuable and relevant!

Sorry for the second post, but I just realized that my blog link was incorrect; well, that makes a nice case for having time to edit a comment post. lol

I guess I'm kind of old school for my own reasons. For instance, it's not quite true that meta tags are no longer valid; it's mainly only true for Google. You didn't mention Yahoo or MSN or any other search engine, but I've noticed that even when I may have low or no Google ranking, I'm usually doing okay on the other two. So, I'd rather be high somewhere, as there are some people who won't use Google for any reason whatsoever, and to me, it's nice being ranked, and highly, in other places also.

At the same time, I understand your point about the meta description, but I think that one depends on what it is you're writing. If I'm writing an article and I begin the article with a story, there's no way Google has any idea what my article is really about. So, the meta description is there to tell people what my article is about, supported hopefully by my keywords and keyword descriptions throughout the article, bolstered, if only for other search engines, with my meta keywords, links, et al, and I still get to tell my story and weave it into the actual point of the article and all is good. However, if I'm writing something more specific, such as how to improve SEO on blogs, well, that might work better by leaving the description alone because there's no extraneous discussion going on.

So, there are really no absolutes either way. But it's a great discussion to have anyway, and I've enjoyed what you wrote and all the comments.

Oh, as a sidebar to Peter, did you decide to drop CommentLuv, or were you having problems with it?

Yes Mitch, I have seen myself getting traffic from windows live and I have never targeted that site, who knows how they work. I will look at that site and see if their traffic are good for me.

I guess you may right mitch, I just checked my visitors and they cam mostly form windows live and I were never targeted that site. Dodnt even use windows live or know much about them. But most of the people that came to my site from search engines came from those guys. I guess I will ned to check a lil more how good could it be traffic from windows live.
Luis

Hi Mitch,

Actually what you said is correct, and doesn't make you "old school" in the bad way. I certainly didn't specify it and it was my wrong, but it's true that most of what I'm saying does relate towards Google, and not Yahoo or MSN.

Yahoo still does give value to on-page optimization (I don't know for how long), at least much more than Google does. Google really put a lot of emphasis on backlinking.

There's no denying that a top ranking in Google is quite something considering the market share they cover; however, somebody working exclusively on Yahoo and MSN getting top ranking there could do extremely well too!

The world is not all about Google. I'm just used to answer questions and write about SEO mainly for Google by default and fail to remember that everybody doesn't focus just on Google and I didn't mentioned it.

Thanks for reminding me this Mitch!

@Mitch: Thanks for telling me about commentluv not showing. I didn't even know. It's this Disqus new plugin I installed. It's giving me lots of headache and this is a new one added to it. The support provided is appalling. They don't even respond to your problems to begin with.

i enjoyed this post you had a lot of great ideas i never ever used meta tags or description because i didn't think they were important

Well I couldn't agree more with your response, its very well put. SEO is indeed an art and a combination of many parts as you say. Well done on a very informative blog too by the way.

Thank you Mike, I'm glad that we came to a consensus! I'll be honored if you could come and comment too on my blog! I enjoy both compliment and constructive criticism, this is what help us improve!

@nicholas Prudhon: Nicholas, someone in Warrior Forum read your post and disagreed with a few things. I thought you may wish to comment on what he's said. ....Thanks!

"That’s right, if your on-page optimization does include Meta tags such as “Meta Keywords” and “Meta Description” I can guarantee you that you are losing traffic because of them!"

Feedback:
========
It's highly unlikely you will lose traffic if you use meta keywords and meta description. It's been well known for a long time now that the SE's place very little weight (if any) on meta keywords. However it's still common practice for SEO professionals to implement them for their clients. Go take a look at The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia

As for meta descriptions Google may pull the content which is most relevant to the search term however more often than not you could increase CTR by creating your own.

"If you are like most of the folks out there and your pages are still optimized the old fashion way, your content is probably optimized around one good keyword only and you have prepared a killer description to invite all the people to click on your search result.

That was fine before, but things have changed in SEO and in the web users’ behavior.

People no longer search for one keyword or even a two words search term! They are entering much longer sentences or questions; and Google is acknowledging this behavior by extending its suggested snippets lengths."

Feedback:
========
I believe this is also false, short search phrases get more searches than long tail phrases the majority of the time. People generally will search for a broad term, if they don't find what they want they will enter something more specific and continue the process till they find what they are looking for. I manage some pretty big PPC accounts and it is clearly evident that this is the case.

I still believe the correct way to structure a site is to optimize your top level pages around the short term, high traffic phrases and within those pages you add your pages optimized around the long tail.

On page optimization is still extremely important, if you don't have a particular keyword on your page you will not rank for it. Unless you have links point to that page with that keyword in the anchor text. Also Google is now looking at keywords surrounding your back links and it is possible to rank for those also. However that's not something you want to rely on.

There are a few comments on there about the all in one SEO pack plug-in for Wordpress. No, it is highly unlikely that you will be penalized for using this. Google doesn't penalize sites anywhere near as much as people think. If you have a massive bunch of keywords in your meta keyword tag then Google will probably take the first 250 characters or so and ignore the rest.

Also if you use Google Webmaster Tools, Google encourages you to use your own meta description, and ensuring each is unique indicates a quality site to Google.


"Google is really working to become more and more "organic" and any kind of attempt to manipulate the results are getting severely sanctioned."

Feedback:
========
Adding meta keywords and meta descriptions is not "manipulation" it's helping the search engines understand what your page is about. Sure other on page factors are believed to hold more weight but every little bit counts.

WOW, thanks a lot for sharing Peter!

Obviously that person is so narrow minded that he failed to comprehend what was said.

Of course you don't get penalized by the search engines by using your meta tag, nor do you rank any lower either, it's not what I'm talking about.

What you don't gain is what you lose. If somebody look at the search result and decide to go click on a site that is not yours because their description in the result page looks more relevant to them, then yes, I do consider that you are losing some traffic.

Because you still implement them doesn't mean that you are "wrong", yet because some big sites still use them doesn't mean they are right either. big sites are hardly relevant when we talk about SEO because of the way they generate their traffic is very different than us. The New Your Times advertising budget is nothing to compare to mine (and yours I believe), SEO is a way to give us a chance (small guys) to level up with those big guys. Do you really think the New York Times needs Google for us to know they exist?

How can you optimize a single ad (your description) to fully be the most relevant for all types of searches? That's BS and anyone who have been any bit involved with PPC knows that very well for instance.

Short terms keyword brings more traffic... bla bla bla... Sure, optimize your site for "internet" and you'll find that your keyword really get a lot of searches about 300,000 per month, now, if you actually manage to rank for that... or even if you use PPC... tell me how many of those folks are actually going to join your affiliate program?

The key to the success of a site is not traffic, it's "Quality Targeted Traffic".

On page optimization has for sole purpose to identify your site for indexing, what rank your site is your inbound link strategy. The fact is that with a massive and powerful linking strategy, you could rank for a search term that doesn't even exist on your page.

I think that answers to all the comments made by this contributing person.

Obviously, some people are bound to disagree :) but isn't that what makes commenting and posting so entertaining!

Narrow minded eh? Let me try again in simple terms so as not to confuse...

"That’s right, if your on-page optimization does include Meta tags such as “Meta Keywords” and “Meta Description” I can guarantee you that you are losing traffic because of them!"
>> Yes there are instances when Google's own generated snippet may pull long tail keywords which do not exist in your custom meta description resulting in improved CTR. It really depends on the content, I believe there are cases either way.

Also, I was under the impression that Google displays whatever it believes is most relevant to the search term. If your meta description is unrelated then it will be ignored? Is that incorrect?

"Meta Keywords are no longer used in SEO, this is an old practice that is more harmful than beneficial considering that not only the Meta Keywords don’t give you anymore additional value and that misuse of them my get you penalized for over-optimization…"
>>I think penalization is highly unlikely and this is what i was referring to in my original post

"Do you really think the New York Times needs Google for us to know they exist?"
>>I am sure being an IM & SEO pro you know that the advertising on sites like NYTimes is per impression. The more traffic they can obtain the more money they make therefore I think they would want to rank well in Google would they not? My point was about being penalized for excessive keyword tags. I accept NY Times was probably not the best example because it's believed Google have it's own set of rules for the major sites.

"How can you optimize a single ad (your description) to fully be the most relevant for all types of searches?"
>>No you can't but you are assuming every page is going to rank for a number of different terms which have no relevancy to the main keyword.

"Short terms keyword brings more traffic... bla bla bla... Sure, optimize your site for "internet" and you'll find that your keyword really get a lot of searches about 300,000 per month, now, if you actually manage to rank for that... or even if you use PPC... tell me how many of those folks are actually going to join your affiliate program?"
>>I was simply responding to this comment "People no longer search for one keyword or even a two words search term! They are entering much longer sentences or questions; and Google is acknowledging this behavior by extending its suggested snippets lengths."
>>I don't see any mention about conversions in your original post? Like I said your main pages should be focused around the main keywords and inner pages targeting the long tail and you should sculpt your PageRank accordingly. 'Internet' is an extremely general term and a poor example which doesn't back up your statement at all. Sure more targeted keywords are going to convert better but that doesn't mean you completely ignore the more general terms.

"The fact is that with a massive and powerful linking strategy, you could rank for a search term that doesn't even exist on your page."
>> Yes you can and I made that exact comment in my own post however for us "small guys" we don't have the resources to implement "massive and powerful" linking strategies therefore on-page optimization is extremely important and you can't rely on back links in order to rank for certain keywords.

Anyway I am not disagreeing with the general message you are portraying it is more aimed at some of your comments which in hindsight I may have misinterpreted. I definitely agree that there is a lot of misconception about meta tags and I cringe whenever I hear people stating that they can be used to achieve improved rankings.

Hi Mike,

It's actually good that you came in person to reply! It's much easier to talk directly with the person instead of an intermediary...

I didn't mean to insult you when I said narrow minded, but I do come across a lot of those people (and I'm sure you do too).

I think our experience and understanding of the global rules of IM and SEO takes us to discuss and argue at another level than what was originally intended here for the readers...

Obviously we both know that SEO is not the matter of one element but truly a combination of many including, structure, onpage, offpage, age, links, keywords, content, traffic quality, click through rate, ROI,etc...

I'm really glad that you replied because I does indeed clarify many things. It would appear to me that we agree on a global level, and what we are arguing on is simply different situations in different context only.

We could write a book with over 1,000 pages on SEO and this is only a small post... So if the explanation I gave weren't 100% backed within context each time for clarification, I apologize sincerely for it to you.

Ultimately, SEO is an art and not a science. The goal is still to get as many targeted visitors as possible to the site of our choice, be it by ranking high on search engine or not. How people achieve that varies a lot and in truth doesn't matter as long as it is an ethical way.

Oh.. I didn't see this discussion which was actually some of the same things that I commented on above. Nicolas what seems to still be left out is whether you believe that you can force Google to show your meta description in the search results when Google doesn't find it relevant? From my knowledge this is no longer true but if you have evidence that proves otherwise please share.

If you agree that it is not so then I don't see how you will find using meta descriptions to be harmful in any way?

Nicolas isn't implying that it may be harmful in some way he is simply stating that your custom meta description may not have as higher click through rate as the snippet generated by Google. In that respect you may be losing traffic.

I also believe that regardless of whether or not you have a custom meta description or not Google will display whatever is most relevant to the search term. I'd be interested to see some hard evidence as to whether this is true or not.

Thanks for answering for me Mike!

It is quite difficult to talk about "hard evidence" since both parties can demonstrate situations of great benefit with or without description but one common way to see, if it can helps as an evidence is to look at the conversion factor.

We all know that long tail keywords convert better than 1 or 2 words search terms ( I believe we agree on that) because customers who know what they want are more likely to take action.

Unfortunately, most of the description, no matter how good they are are hardly ever optimized for long tail keywords... and this where you benefit because as it has been mentioned, Google has the ability to "snippet" not just page content to generate a description from your page but to snippet the Meta Description (since neither is a perfect representation for the query)... so anyway Google has the final say of what is displayed.

...as to the conversion ability of what is returned by google, what is more likely to bring a sale conversion to your page (i.e.)?

"Computers" or "P4 system 4gb RAM 2 GB VRAM duel power supply" ?

I'm not trying to debate more, but to explain you my point through an example if it may helps to clarify my position.

I feel one should only concentrate hard on Meta tags because they are very important and yes rest of the unnecessary tags needn't be given too much attention for sure! Excellent write-up.

@ Nicolas Prudhon: "Honestly, what works the best in the first place is to think about what people really want to look on internet. Like I "knew" that much more people are actually looking for answers to "Why my site is not indexed in Google?" rather than "Google Indexing" keyword combination."

Nicholas, need your advice on this. Ok, granted that we now say the new approach ought to be using long tail keywords instead of the usual one keyword or short keyword phrase, how can we tell the volume of searches for such long phrases like in your example "Why my site is not indexed in Google". I mean from the old conventional way we would look up Google Keyword Selection Tool to find and use keywords/phrases with the most searches for the least competition. How do we do this now. Or do we totally ignore the checking from Keyword Tools. I guess we could and possibly veering onto the subject of LSI, which also talks about long tail searches and the use of many similar keyword phrases that we should use instead of one or 2 keywords domination in your post. Are we now talking the same as LSI? What are your views on LSI?

Ok Peter, I ddin't really develop on this because it's not the main subject of this post. But here it is:

What you are trying to do by working on this kind of long tail/action keywords is to cover a broader market by covering it from the ground up. My recent post "Outsmarting the Competition with Long Tail Keywords" (http://www.nicolasprudhon.com/seo-help/outsmart...) actually pretty much answers your question.

There's a fact that a page that is optimized (easily) for something long tail like "Why my site is not indexed in Google" can also be optimized later on for "Site Indexing in Google", or "Google Indexing" or "Google" if you feel like. On the other hand it may be much more difficult to demonstrate to your readers that your page on "Google Indexing" is very relevant to "Why my site is not indexed in Google?". In addition, since the long tail keyword is much easier to optimize for, you'll get a ranking faster, and thus traffic too, no matter how minimal it is, or you can try to start to rank #1 for "Google" and in 10 years still haven't got any visitor to your site...

It's hard indeed to know the exact traffic volume of a LTK, but consider the fact that a post that is optimized for action and broad answers, do cover an enormous amount of LTK variation that you would never think of, and if getting 5-15 visitors for one LTK is not much indeed, getting it from 1,000 different combination is another story.

Think also of traffic quality. What do you think 100 ultra targeted visitors who come to your blog through a search like "Join a program recommended by Peter Lee" are worth compare to 1,000 people who came to site through "Online Blog" looking for peg grooming tips.

By starting with your LTK, you can generate traffic and ranking faster at first. Later you can increase your ranking and authority by targeting relevant yet more competitive keywords by enhancing your inbound linking strategy using the more competitive keywords in your anchor text.

I hope this answer your question somehow...

So basically write for how people search, be detailed. The All In One SEO still seems like a good idea. You can create a title and description for those searching and help them get some info on if your content is really relevant to them.

I didn't say that using any kind of SEO pack was "bad". Of course there's a drawback and benefits for each option:

* With Description: You get a very nice description formatted exactly like what you want. Now this description may not be as relevant as it should be for all the search queries. Keep in mind too that some people are getting quite lazy about writing a good description and things "This is my blog written by John Doe" doesn't really help much, you may be better off without one...

* Without Description: Your description will always be as relevant as possible to the search query based on your content. However, what you gain in relevancy, you lose in control as to what is displayed and formatting (this way may not look as nice as a pre-written one).

It's a choice we have to make based on what matters the most to us. Whether we are trying to convey a generic message for which we have full control over, or giving up that "control" and part of aesthetic to gain on relevancy.

Nicolas, I have to admit that I do not completely agree with your on this post. It is true that meta keywords are obsolete in all major search engines but relying on Google (or any other SE) to pick the best meta description for you is a bit of a long shot IMO. The fact is that Google will pick whatever they feel will be most relevant and if your perfectly constructed meta description isn't relevant in the eyes of Google they'll just pick their own. You can't force them to show your description.

So the best way to go about this IS to use a meta description that will entice people to click when they find your site when searching for your major keyword phrases. If they find your site searching for the long tail they'll most likely see what Google finds most appropriate based on their search and you couldn't have had any effect on that anyway.

You don't have to agee but that is how I see it and also the way that e.g. the Stompernet guys explain it when they teach SEO.

@Mikael Rieck- I agree with you, I will not trust in Google to help me in the serps. Who knows when they decide to change their algorithms and then now I am not longer relevant and may send me other kind of traffic that is not good for me.

I may have some kind of paranoia, but I dont trust at all in Google. I have seen too many slaps. Some slaps had been in a very personal way and some others to everyone, they are like the mob, but they are a necessary evil. I cannot live without them and cannot live with them, lol.

Personally, I feel and have seen over the years, that people who focus on doing the right things with they sites, be it blog or traditional website, that is: providing genuine resourceful content for their visitors as it should be; never have to worry about any change made by Google. In fact blogs who have spend their time writing quality content until now, actually do benefit from those changes, so unless you are even remotely engage in some sort of "limit at the border" or straight "unethical" tactic on your site, there's very little to worry about the changes Google makes.

Hi Mikael, it's perfectly right for you to have your own opinion, in fact if everybody was to agree, commenting would be very boring, right?

I see your point and respect it, and to a certain extend understand your concern, and surely some people may see this as "a long shot" but honestly, I believe myself that if your content is well written, regardless of what is returned it can't really be bad.

But if it's something that is too much of a gamble for you, there's nothing wrong to keep your description tag. I think we all can argue and bring examples of how having or not having description tag helps or not.

What matters is for one to do what he or she feels the best for his/her site. To me, as long as the method you are using works great for you, it's fine for you to keep it. It your results on the other hand are not that amazing, it cost nothing to try it out.

Thanks again for expressing your opinion Mikael, I hope I'll have the chance to see you commenting on my blog too!

Hi Nicolas,

Great post! Your view about the keyword and description tags actually makes sense. After Google's new change in their algorithm, my website dropped a page or so in the SERPS. I'm considering trying your idea and removing the tags to see what happens.

Now I have a question. I use All-In-One SEO for my Wordpress blogs. Would you say we should just leave out the description fields for the posts? I've been starting to do this just for the lack of taking the time. Also, for the site details, should we leave out the description and keywords that are used? I would say yes according to your article. I'd rather let Google decide since that's what they're starting to do in making results more "organic."

Thanks for the very insightful post.

Alan

I guess the recent comments above answered my question... LOL. I'll be sure to take note of this in the future. Thanks again!

Hi Alan,

The fact is SEO is less and less "technical" and relies more and more on "what make sense" like you said.

You will compensate the lack of description by a good Title for your page and your post, as well as a very well written content. Very well written content for your readers is important as Google will get some snippets of it to make up your description.

The description used by Google is usually about 2 sentences snippets from your content. I noticed a tendency for Google to put extra weight on the first sentence of a post and then another one which contains the words entered in the search box.

It's not an absolute truth but you can increase your odds by taking this in consideration when writing your first sentence.

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for the reply. Reading the other comments further down, I'm still up in the air on the subject. I tend to agree with both sides, but it comes down to each individual's preference. I think that even with a predefined description, Google will show what it wants. Without a description, Google still shows what it wants, but now we don't have a controlled description. It's an interesting topic to say the least. For now, I'm leaving my descriptions out.

Well with all our debating here, I hope we helped people have a better understanding of what's going on with the description whether you have it or not.

And at the very least, regardless of the fact that they use description or not, they should be able to make an informed decision now.

@ Nicolas Prudhon: I'm glad you chose this topic as you can see from comments here, this has been an interesting conversation and many of us can now make better decisions. At the end of the day, it's a personal choice which way to go, which way helps you at better ranking. I've learned a lot too. You've written a great post that has helped a lot of readers here. Thanks!

Thanks for inviting me Peter!

Great post. I do have a question though. How does this apply to Worpress? I'm using Allin One SEO plugin and try to add Keywords and descriptions. Should I not be doing that?
Thanks,
Luca

Thanks for that. I was under the impression that The All In One SEO Plugin was important so I was spending more time on that then Tags. See I thought that the Tags were more of a search feature for the Blog and not so much for Search Engines.
Thanks again

Hi Luca, it applies to all sites or blogs. All-in-one SEO was great before but what people and search engines want has changed. You are wasting your time with your keywords and description, but make sure to add regular tags and Technorati tags to your posts.
Look out for the Optimal Title plugin it can helps.

Hi Nicolas,

I've noticed that tagging does help, more than keywords. The description tag doesn't really help, but it assists the readers when searching in Google. So it acts more benefit for the searcher, not Google.

That's correct James, it's important to add tags (for tagging, not meta tags) and possibly technorati tags too, it really does help.

Lol I take it that the new SEO strategy is to bold your type? Though you will have some success with that , and you may be right about meta tags and such, I would recommend unbolding a few keywords. You aren't going to rank for very much if you focus on so many varied keyword phrases. I would recommend narrowing it down a little bit so that you can rank higher for them. But thanks for the update on meta tags. I'll read around and probably write a post on it.

Hi Jonathan, no the strategy is not to bold anything in particular but really to write quality content targeted for the readers audience and not about keyword density for the search engines. I just happen to bold what I think is important and needs more emphasis that's all.

You can narrow your optimization for specific keyword with the anchor text used in your backlinks but it's not necessary to do it on-page.

Thanks for sharing your view of it!

Nicolas,

First allow me to say that your post is very interesting. Secondly while I understand what you are saying I am scared beyond belief at removing those two meta tags because I really don’t want to lose my standings in the SERP’s that I have fought to get. However I will give you suggestions a try on one of my websites and see what the outcome is. I will report back with my findings.

If you are doing great in the SERP and don't feel confident yet, it's fine. Changes can be very scary! The best way for you is to experiment with new posts you may have for example. If the results are positives for you and don't affect negatively your site then you'll be able to shift more easily. Anyway, this is more a "tip" than a "must do" and certainly challenges a lot of beliefs!

Thanks for responding Nicolas. Out of curiosity I swallowed my fears and removed the meta tags for my website which is currently in Google at position #12 for my keyword. I also pinged the website and did some social networking to get the attention of the SERP’s so we will see the results shortly. I will post again on this topic whether good or bad.

Ok, actually there shouldn't be any difference in your SERP, this is more about your visitors to prefer your "new" description or not.

It doesn't make Google love you more or less.

I am confused! Why wouldn't it make a difference to the SERP's considering that the meta data I created was done so specifically for both the SERP's and readers to be attracted to my website. Now that the meta info is removed aren't I giving the SERP's the power to present my readers with whatever description they choose which I am certain it wouldn't be something that would make someone click trough to my website. I remember before I knew about meta tags the SERP's gave me no love at all and once I started showing up the descriptions they showed didn't make me feel like clicking through. Once I put the meta data into my website not only did my position skyrocket from the 13th page of Google to the 2 page but I also starting making money from selling my ebook. We will see soon.

It wouldn't maka difference because times have changed in SEO, and what was working great before is not the same as what is working now.

You are right, there was a time when having keywords in your description and "a lot" of keywords was very helpful.

Search engines (especially Google) have decided to put a stop to that to encourage more work on the quality of your content.

Today, I would say that using either keywords or description has no weight in your ranking position, and this is why it won't make a difference anymore. The description is no longer to rank you but to show something relevant to the people who typed a search query.

I hope this is more clear for you.

Nicolas, here's an update! I removed the meta tags as you suggested last week and today I did a search on Google for my keywords and I have moved from the 12th position to the 9th position (first page, first time)!

Although the move is impressive the description that Google now gives is a random snippet of a phrase taken from within the page and if I were looking to purchase my ebook I wouldn't click my own link because it doesn't entice me to do so like when I had meta data.

However because I haven't installed any analytics to track the webpage it is too early to tell but I will do so today and track it for the next week to see how people respond to the new description Google is now displaying. I will report next week. One more question, you said that “using either keywords or description has no weight in your ranking position” so why did the webpage jump up in the SERP's once I implemented your suggestion?

The weight of the description is very very small in the global ranking equation, in your case, maybe it made the difference, or you did something else great too :) Google value Aging sites, so as time pass by, you do get more authority, this could have played a bit too.

Keep up informed of your progression, it's very interesting to see facts!

Wow is all I can say. I just had someone call me up wanting to ask a few questions of me before deciding to purchase my ebook and I asked them how they found me in the first place. The answer nearly knocked me off my chair because they said “You’re #3 On The First Page Of Yahoo”.

Why is it such a shock? Because, until today I have not had any luck with getting that webpage indexed in Yahoo until I came here, read and followed the directions of Peter and Nicolas.

I just want to say thanks guys and I will be reporting on the other results mentioned in my last post on Saturday or Sunday.

I've noticed that some SEO people don't even bother with keywords, so how does rich text linking work, with the usage of keywords? Is it found from other phrases and words located in the title tags, and heading tags?

Hi James good question indeed. Well I am probably one of those people who don't bother so much with keywords as I used to... but as you saw in my ebook, it doesn't prevents me to get awesome results from the Google (like top 7 positions on the first page for search terms with over 21,000,000 results).

Honestly, what works the best in the first place is to think about what people really want to look on internet. Like I "knew" that much more people are actually looking for answers to "Why my site is not indexed in Google?" rather than "Google Indexing" keyword combination.

Now, when I offer additional resources to my readers by referring other blogs that I think are relevant and useful to them, not only do I get a Trackback link with my page title (which is optimized and make it a power link) I like to post a comment there too, which not only ensures that my link back is accepted but often the author is grateful and give me a comment back, and I get access to some of his/her readers too.

Sounds like nothing, but just this way I get at least 10 backlinks from 5 related sites with quality content. This is a first step.

Now we can't deny that keywords in anchor text have their value, I'm either free to use the entire sentence again as anchor text or I can use just the short keyword version too (to emphasize a bit more specifically the relevancy topic). I will do that a lot with article marketing signatures.

Keywords are really at a cross-road i would say, you still need them, but they are not as powerful as they used to be with the way Google spreads relevancy:

Let say I want to optimize for "Computer", Google doesn't want to see "computer" everywhere anymore! instead Google wants to see words like "Dell", "HP", "LCD Monitor", "Graphic Cards" etc... and this is why it's useless to bother about keywords density and the easiest way to do is by writing good content for your readers (as specified in Google' guidelines).

To narrow on your question, your keywords or optimized concept, should be explicit:
_ In your Page Title.
_ In your Post Title (H1).
_ On some backlinks.

After that, you are free to "mention" it from time to time in your content but mostly use related terms and expressions and you'll cover a greater market.

Use Article Marketing (for example) to reinforce specific keywords or terms you want for your post by using different signatures anchor text links.

Let your readers help you spread the words too!

I hope this answers your question somehow...

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for your response, that has cleared up so much. I apply keywords, just to help out my rich anchor text, I've noticed that the keyword rich words,. deeplinks do carry a lot of weight.

The page title, is one of the most important features in SEO. As it is located at the top of the page.

Good question James. I am interested in knowing the answer to this aswell!

Peter Lee, I noticed that with my sites, especially http://www.mybeachdecor.com (which has Meta Tags and Meta Description! :( ) and http://www.petra-weiss.com, I can rank well in Google for any kinds of long tail keywords which I did not optimize for. I keep getting nice surprises by finding my site on Page 1 of the SERPs for something I never even thought about!
I believe that all keyword SEO ( trying to rank well for certain keywords) is slowly dying and things will go over to a much more natural way of ranking - so I think we have to recognize that it is not important any more to have a certain amount of "keywords" on your site, but to simply design a site that is very relevant to your niche, and Google will sort it out - and I believe that if you do a good job in providing relevant information to your niche, your site will rank well for any number of keywords.
Do you agree?

I love this discussion - based on some recent discoveries of my own I have found that some of my pages that were not optimized were doing better than those that I had...very interesting.

Absolutely correct Petra!

Google is really working to become more and more "organic" and any kind of attempt to manipulate the results are getting severely sanctioned.
The new algorithms for which Google registered new patents did inflict some severe blows to some websites which causes many of them to lose their PR (just look around on the blogosphere and see how many people complain about it!)
The best way to optimize your site for the search engines is now to optimize it for your visitors and not the search engines!
Keyword density has become irrelevant, so the best recommendation is indeed to write full quality content for your readers.