SEO Tycoon

**purk** · 03-19-2006, 05:57 PM

i was wondering if having both plural and singular would help or hinder is seo terms.

if it's better to have both then my keywords will grow pretty rapidly.

also does the same apply for on page keywording?

thanks brain-trusties

**vangogh** · 03-19-2006, 08:23 PM

Meta keywords are really a thing of the past. They were abused and stuffed so often that most search engines pretty much ignore them at this point. If you want to use them it's ok. Just make sure to only include keywords that appear on the page somewhere.

If it means anything I don't use them at all on my site. If you spend more than 5 minutes on them across your enitre site you've probably spent too much time on them. The only time I use them now is for a client who insists on having them.

The meta description is still useful. Less for seo and more to convince someone to click on your link if it gets picked up as the description in the search engine results.

**purk** · 03-20-2006, 07:22 AM

hmm, interesting.

maybe i'll slim it down.

any thoughts on the on page stuff??

**vangogh** · 04:17 PM

Definitely write a good title with your keywords. Use keywords in headings and mix it up some throughout the text. I usually don't worry much about keyword density. I just keep the keywords in my head while writing and keep the page focused on a given topic and that usually sorts itself out.

I mention some things in my latest blog post (Content And SEO), but I really do just try to keep it simple. The stuff in the post is mid-way down I think.

I'm sure there is some kind of ideal combination of how often and where to place keywords, but I'm also sure that it varies between search engines and that the time it would take to analyze it all to get it perfect is probably better spent getting links to the page.

**kline11** · 03-20-2006, 05:28 PM

I still use the keywords meta tag, but it reall has little weight, if any at all. I guess I just can't let go.

**vangogh** · 03-20-2006, 07:27 PM

There's really nothing wrong with using it, but I think only a couple of very minor search engines pay any attention to it anymore. It was just spammed way too much over the years so it's all us webmasters who are to blame.

I've seen a few people even suggest that it can actually be a bad thing now since it only tells your competition what keywords you're going after on the page. I think that's kind of silly though since there are many other ways to tell what a keywords a page is going after.

**sadiq** · 03-21-2006, 11:57 AM

I still use Meta tag but i didn`t get success.

**colochris** · 03-22-2006, 04:31 AM

So I must me a newbie ask ask this

but if you do not use meta tags, then how do you get people to come to your site?

Advertising? Like pay per clicks?

I am having struggling for days on how to put meta tags in place. It has been a nightmare. I used this software called webceo, and I could not figure it out at all.

I finally gave up for the night.

So you say that you just make your page titles have the keywords that you want it them?

**colochris** · 03-22-2006, 04:44 AM

also I read somewhere that if you put your keywords in bold in your text that a search engine will pick that up as being important?

**gringo** · 03-22-2006, 05:36 AM

Meta tags aren't as important as they used to be for ranking purposes.

The search engines look at your site's content, page titles and backlinks (and other things) to determine what your site is about and how to rank it.

If you look at this page, it has 'meta keywords' in the <title>, <h1>, <h2> and many other places in the content. It also has 'meta keywords' in anchor text of links pointing to it. These things lead you (and search engines) to believe that this page is about 'meta keywords'.

**vangogh** · 03-22-2006, 04:04 PM

Exactly gringo. Good points.

colochris there's a lot of factors that a search engine looks at when determing which site to show in the search results. No one outside of the search engines knows exactly what they are since it's important for them to keep that info private. Otherwise all of us will be able to easily manipulate the results.

Each of the factors is weighted some way in an algorithm and then based on the algorithm certain sites are determined to be most relevant for a given search.

While no one can say for certain exactly what are the factors or what the weight of each is here's one of the best attempts from SEOmoz and naturally enough called Search Engine Ranking Factors. It's been posted here plenty already so why not one more time.