Meta Tag relivance or what ?

[vintageagain]

<rant>
Long time reader, new poster. But here goes. I test code a popular shopping cart for e-commerce. It at the point everyone if yelling that the cart has a _TITLE_ varibale that stays the same for each page no matter where you are on the site or in the cart. It's a dynamic database driven cart but has the option to NOT use ?=& and other types of directs in the path and a path is given as a normal type URL http://www.somedomain.com/here/path/34/again/ so engines can index it very well as opposed to http://somedomain.com/index.htm=?path34=product/34 type URL produced. But, some coders have this idea that they MUST have keywords to get into the engines. From what I've read here only one or two even care any more about KEYWORDS. But want a good _TITLE_ and relavent content on the page. Can any one give me some documation of this. I'm pushing to have the PRODUCT_NAME placed in the TITLE so the TITLE is relivant to the page content and indexes well. A sample of what I'm doing is here. http://www.por-texas.com where you can see a mod of the code to have a title change dynamicly, compared to http://www.vintageagain.com where the TITLE stays as a constant. </rant>

Views ? Comments ? Leads ?

Thanks
Dave

[Kal]

Welcome Vintageagain :hi:

You're on the right track there - integrating a parameter workaround to remove "?" symbols from your URL's is a very good step. Also, the title tag is a VERY important factor in the relevancy ranking algorithm on some engines, so if you can ensure each page has a different title tag (with keywords reflecting the content of the page), that is also very good. Your visible body text is the most important of all, so make sure this is keyword-rich.

You're right about the keyword tag not being very important for rankings anymore, but if it's possible to incorporate tailored keyword and description META tags for each page as well, that would be the best possible scenario - every little bit helps!

<edit>In terms of documentation, Jill Whalen (one of the mods in here) has written this excellent article (http://www.highrankings.com/allabouttitles.htm) about title tags. You can also find some supporting information on the importance of title and META tags on the search engines themselves - usually on their webmaster guidelines pages. </edit>

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums vintageagain! :hi:

Nice job on the shopping cart! For future reference, which shopping cart are you talking about? Sounds like a winner to me. :)

I noticed on the page you posted that the 'category' links have the same title tag as the front page. It Does change when you click on a product on the category page. You should make it so the title changes on the category page as well. It could be titled the same name as the category link is titled. That would make it even that much better.

[vintageagain]

The Cart is called osCommerce. It's home is http://www.oscommerce.com/ It's open source and the best free cart I've located. I use it on about 20 sites I've set up and manage and it's got most of the features I like. Now to just get it set to be search engine ready. The last modification that helped in this area was to make it SE friendly and be able to remove the dynamic type URL as mentioned above. Next everyone started yelling about META TAGS and I didn't see this as the best way to go. I feel having the TITLE reflect the product name was a better way to get there. The 2 above are my own sites and http://www.por-texas.com has only been up about 2 weeks and just now has a PR of 2 ( every now and then ) and most of the time it's ranked at 0 or NOT RANKED. My web stats don't show any GOOGLE crawls but it does have a casched paged when it is showing a rank of 2. This started Wendsday so I guess Google is updating. Now to just get it ranked and indexed so I can drop the adwords stuff. But the adwords are bringing 100-200 clicks a day and I need the sales from that to keep the site active and going. I run my own servers, so playing with mods server wise and source wise is a hobbie of mine.

Dave

[ihelpyou]

Explain to those who are 'yelling' that the keywords tag would not have to be on those other pages at all. It's simply not used to any extent anymore. Fast and Inktomi still look at it but I truly don't think it weighs in the algo much at all. The others just ignore it. Words on the page are what is important along with the link pop factor and the text in outside links.

It would be good if you could make the description tag dynamic as Ink and Alta will show it in the SERPS, while Google will use it as a last resort only.

[hpdl]

Hello :)

I am the project leader of the shopping cart solution mentioned here, osCommerce.

ihelpyou, do you have any links available where this is officially noted? (in regard to META tags rarely being supported nowadays)

-hpdl

[ihelpyou]

Welcome! :hi:

Officially?

In the search engine biz, not much is official of anything. Simply do a search in these forums for

Keywords tag

And read all the threads. Do the same search on all the se forums out there. You will see that tag means almost nothing anymore.

[Kal]

You might want to take a look at this chart (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/features.html) from Search Engine Watch. If I'm reading this correctly, only AltaVista and Inktomi look at the meta keywords tag when indexing sites and only Inktomi uses it as part of their ranking algorithm.

[Dan0]

Originally posted by Kal
only Inktomi uses it as part of their ranking algorithm.

And I'd even question that conclusion at this point. Most of our sites have no META keywords at all, and we get plenty of referrals from Inktomi engines.

--Dan

[ihelpyou]

I don't think any actually use the keywords tag in the algo. They only look at it. Some ignore it, noticeably Google.

[Advisor]

If you're searching for a particular uncommon word or phrase, and the only place that this word can be found is in the keyword meta tag, inkomi and teoma will often list those pages.

I was doing a search like that the other night for some uncommon thing, and I found some interesting results. When I tried to figure out where they came from, the word I was searching for was in the keyword meta tag. This only happened in Inktomi engines and Teoma.

(It actually did help to find pages that didn't come up in Google and FAST, btw.)

Jill

[Advisor]

As an aside, in regards to my last post...

Those results that I got, lead me to believe that your keyword meta tag should probably actually be used for words that AREN'T on your page, but which are relevant. As opposed to what we often say, i.e., that the keyword tag should be words that already are on your page. If that's all you put in, then the keyword tag really does have no reason to be there.

I may rethink how I use this tag.

Jill

[Kal]

Originally posted by Advisor
As an aside, in regards to my last post...

Those results that I got, lead me to believe that your keyword meta tag should probably actually be used for words that AREN'T on your page, but which are relevant.
Yes I've been thinking along those lines lately too. Things like misspellings, jargon, plurals, cultural differences (e.g. jelly vs jam) or slang would be ideal to include in the KW tag.

[kneelsit]

I would have to agree on that score Jill and Kal. I have evidence from my tracking logs which rather surprised me - a medical term which was NOT on my page but in the keywords was used to find my site. This has hapened on a few occasions now.

Only thing is I can't remember which SE it came from - but it was most likely Inktomi based.

[Advisor]

Greg, the medical term was in your meta keyword tag?

Jill

[Dan0]

Thanks for the info, Jill. I may start doing the same thing, to get related terms in somewhere, when it makes sense to do so. I don't know how often that will come up, but it's a promising area to pursue.

I'm not going to burn a whole lot of daylight on misspellings and that sort of thing, though.

Dan0

[kneelsit]

Sorry Jill did not notice the question mark - YES the meta keywords.

[vintageagain]

Just wanted to give an update. After hacking the code to show the Page Content as the PAGE TITLE my rank has jumped from around 100-125 on 3 major keywords to #2-2-3 on the 3 same word in the last 2 months. So.. Dynamic database driven sites can be hi-ranking :) I have some pretty upset people on my case now :) My compition is wanting to know who I jumped over their rank with a website that's only 3 months old when they have been around for 3-5 years each.

Now.. as Im being crawled again by Google, lets see if next update puts me in #1 spot on the 3 keywords. The number one spot is now being held by the companys home site. THAT should stir up some people. :)

Thanks for all the help guys.

Dave
:cheers: