Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [49]
Unfortunately, metatags suffered from overuse and bad information. In the early days of SEO, the metatags were the primary elements for optimization. Simply using your keywords in the metatags could boost your rankings. Unfortunately, you could also boost your rankings for words that were irrelevant to your website, because even nonrelevant terms in the metatags could gain rankings.
Why would someone do that? It all had to do with page views. Many sites at the time were selling advertising based on hits or page views. If you could gain rankings for a term such as Disneyland even though your site was not about Disneyland, you could gain thousands of page views from frustrated searchers who clicked your site and contributed to the page views. Fortunately, we’ve grown up since those days.
What about Meta Keywords?
The meta keyword tag has fallen on such rough times that it is barely even used by any of the major search engines, if at all. The keyword tag was so abused by webmasters and SEO practitioners that the function of the keyword metatags is well beyond the original intent.
For years, I have not even used the keyword tag in site optimization or development. It can help your site if you utilize an internal search engine or an intranet search, because it can be defined as a factor for a site’s internal search, but very few search engines (if any) use this tag. The primary focus is on context and semantics, rather than a strict keyword match in a metatag. My advice for marketers is there are much better things to do with your busy day than spending time stressing over this outdated tactic.
As discussed in Chapter 4, the snippet check outlines the importance of the meta description. The meta description is not used as a ranking factor, but it is very visible to the searcher as an important key to the content on your pages. The meta description tag usually shows up in the search results as the “snippet” of information below the page title link. This changes in the search results based on the search terms and can sometimes look like a random sampling of words and phrases. Because of this, it is best to write a two- to three-sentence description of the content of each unique page. This will improve your chances of providing relevant content in the snippet, which can attract the click-through.
This was evidenced by a research white paper published by Enquiro (Enquiro Eye Tracking Report, July 2005; http://pages.enquiro.com/whitepaper-enquiro-eye-tracking-report-I-google.html). Enquiro used eye-tracking technology to study searcher behavior when evaluating search results. There were interesting behaviors throughout, but one of the more specific areas when it comes to meta descriptions was the snippet of information in the search results. Searchers exhibited a behavior called fixation points, which are areas of the page where the searchers eyes stopped, if only for a split-second but ideally long enough to read a word. Typical fixation points in the search results page were the bold text (your search terms are bold in the search results), brand names, prices, and icons (see Figure 5-3).
The impact of this behavior is clear. Your snippets need to contain as much specific information as possible, not just for the keyword, but for all the information related on the page. For example, in Enquiro’s eye-tracking study, a searcher for the term digital camera would fixate on brand names such as Sony, Fuji, and Samsung. Sites that incorporated prices and product features were able to gain visibility. In a sense, searchers may type in only a few search terms but have a whole mind full of additional product questions. Gord Hitchkiss, CEO of Enquiro, referred to this as the semantic cloud, referring to the related terms that were not typed into the search box but are part of the search query. The more relevant terms and features that