hi , i am currently in the process of optimising a site i work on www.directline-citybreaks.co.uk. We rank very poorly for certain keywords so when i was looking at the source caode i notice that we use the :

meta http-equiv = keywords & meta http-equiv= decription tags.

When i check metas with online tools etc they all return an error saying that there are 0 words in our keywords tag and description tags? I have checked the source code on all of our competitiors who are above us in terms of seo and none of them use this form of tags ?

Should i be using the equiv tags or the name tags for these two values , my gut feelinf is that we should be using the name = version , although the site is developed in coldfusin could this be the reason?

the http-equiv is actually designed to be used as http headers and as there is no such header as "keywords" it will do diddly.

however as the meta keywords content is useless for SEO I wouldn't worry about it.

what about the description tag

means little or nothing for SEO but can get shown as the text snippet for some searches.


maybe you should visit the SEO forums a little further down the page.

META tags aren't very effective these days they were before and so people abused them by placing millions of keywords in them, now search engines ignore them.

If you're using google for your comparisons there's something you should know. Most of the popular search engines (especially google) use meta-tags for the purposes of classification. Your web-site will only rank higher if people link to it (it's known as a polling system). Spread the word about the site, and you'll rank higher as your poularity goes up.

It takes time, but be patient. There is no way to force your web-site above everyone elses. There are no tricks that work for more than a week.

Google will actually down-rank your site if you try and trick it into moving it up the ranks. They know what tricks work, they let them go for a while, then they cut you off, and push you down the list.

There must have been a couple posts about this in the "Search Engines" forum already.

If you still want to correct your meta tags, this is the style I was taught:

<meta name="description" content="This Business - Main Page" />
<meta name="keywords" content="words seperated by spaces or commas" />
<meta name="author" content="jeffmcsheff" />

The keywords you use should correspond to content that is actually on your page.

(I may ammend this post with content from my class notes later on).

If you're using google for your comparisons there's something you should know. Most of the popular search engines (especially google) use meta-tags for the purposes of classification. Your web-site will only rank higher if people link to it (it's known as a polling system). Spread the word about the site, and you'll rank higher as your poularity goes up.

It takes time, but be patient. There is no way to force your web-site above everyone elses. There are no tricks that work for more than a week.

Google will actually down-rank your site if you try and trick it into moving it up the ranks. They know what tricks work, they let them go for a while, then they cut you off, and push you down the list.

There must have been a couple posts about this in the "Search Engines" forum already.

If you still want to correct your meta tags, this is the style I was taught:

<meta name="description" content="This Business - Main Page" />
<meta name="keywords" content="words seperated by spaces or commas" />
<meta name="author" content="jeffmcsheff" />

The keywords you use should correspond to content that is actually on your page.

(I may ammend this post with content from my class notes later on).