Hey All
I came across a couple of META TAGS yesterday that I have never seen before.
I have done a bit of a search and have not found much information on them.
They are servicing area and classification.
Are these worth using? Do they have much weight for SEO?
Also I am curious… what set of META TAGS do you use for SEO?
mrmbarnes
[font=verdana]Not sure what you mean by “servicing area and classification” … can you give us an example?
The only <meta> tag that I know of being useful for SEO is the description. It doesn’t have any effect on where your site appears in the rankings, but it does mean that you can hope to control what is displayed in the snippet under the page title. Some people like to use the keywords tag as well, but this has minimal impact – if it uses words that don’t feature in the content then search engines will ignore it, all it does is give them a hint as to which words from the content are the most important, but to be honest if search engines can’t figure that out for themselves then the chances are that your page is sp badly written and coded that all you’re doing is putting a sticking plaster on a broken limb.
I’m not aware of any other <meta> tags that search engines take into consideration.
I’ve moved this thread to Internet Marketing, which is where we have discussions about SEO
Here is what I found yesterday:
<meta name=“description” content=“Carpet Cleaning Melbourne Bayside Area and also Provides Upholstery Cleaning, Rug Cleaning. Moris Chem Dry is trained and professional carpet cleaners” />
<meta name=“keywords” content="Carpet Cleaning, Carpet Cleaning Melbourne, Upholstery cleaning Melbourne, Rug Cleaning Melbourne, Carpet Cleaners Melbourne, Upholstery Cleaners Melbourne, pet urine removal,flood water damage, leather cleaning, mattress cleaning, tile and grouts cleaning, carpet stain removal " />
<meta name=“servicing area” content=“Melbourne, Bentleigh, Brighton vic, Black Rock, Beaumaris, Braeside, Caulfield, Chadstone, Carnegie, Clayton, Clarinda, Cheltenham, Dingley Village, Elsternwick, Elwood, Edithvale, Glenhuntly, Glen Iris, Gardenvale, Hughesdale, Huntingdale, Heatherton, Highett, Hampton, Kooyong, Malvern, Murrumbeena, McKinnon, Moorabbin, Mentone, Mordialloc, Notting Hill, Oakleigh, Ormond, Parkdale, Ripponlea, St Kilda East, Bayside, Sandringham” />
<meta name=“distribution” content=“Melbourne, Victoria, Australia”>
<meta name=“classification” content=“carpet cleaning, steam cleaning, upholstery cleaning, Carpet Dry Cleaning, stain removal, rug cleaning, commercial carpet cleaning, protection and sanitising, dust mite anti allergen, leather couch cleaning, pet urine removal treatment, mattress, auto interiors” >
Unless they’re appealing to a specific service that reads those tags [i.e. not a major engine but a specific site like Facebook’s sharing meta data] that’s not adding any value. It is however a great way to identify who is trying to “SEO” themselves.
what particular meta tags have you come across with? the meta tags are vital for any on-page SEO. You can simply insert the major keyword/s of your site in the tags for Google to catch up. Chances are, your site might come up when people search about your keywords, especially if they’re placed in the meta tags.
Google has never used the meta keyword tag for general sites and while the description tag shows up in some search results as body text that’s hardly going to make you rank for a term on its own.
[font=verdana]Although Google says that it doesn’t use the keywords tag, some recent studies have suggested that it can make a small difference to the positioning of your site. Essentially, it helps Google to understand which words in the content of your page you are targeting, and prioritises the site more for those words than others. It goes without saying that spamming the keywords tag with phrases, sentences or more than about 8–10 words is not going to help you at all, and nor will using words that are not clearly relevant to the page content.
The description tag is used purely to generate the snippet on the SERPs, it is not used at all in the ranking algorithm. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a crucial tag to use![/font]
There’s no mention of those tags on Google Webmaster Central, which I can only assume means that they don’t use them. Those tags may be used by an internal document management system or search engine, or another external search engine. In terms of the keywords tag, that would be ignored by Google as they have completely ignored the guidance on how to use it – 8–10 words maximum, no phrases (other than where the words only come in pairs), no repetition.
in Google Meta tags like Keywords and Description dont affect your pages ranking and never have (and ive been doing seo since 1998 so i know)
meta description can help with clickthrough rates for your listing so best to put those in but i wouldnt bother with keywords
tags like refresh, nocache, noindex and others do help you control a users experience and/or how search engines perceive your website but again they dont have any influence on ranking.
Description, keyword and similar tags by themselves won’t rank your site higher. You can fill the tags up any way you want, but if they don’t match the content of your site, you won’t rank higher and even run a small risk of attracting Google’s wrath for “fiddling”.
If you are running a business in a specific area, the geo tags are of almost vital importance.
However, if your site does not have useful and unique content, no amount of whitehat seo will rank you #1.
This kind of meta tag helps Google for find your website location base.
[FONT=Verdana]Strange - Google doesn’t mention any of those tags when explaining how they check your location. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399
By far the easiest way to notify Google of your target location is to set it in Webmaster Tools.
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As always, I would suggest not to concentrate more on the META data content.
Once you have a one line information about your company and services with your major product names or keywords, you can add it to your title or description tag of your homepage.
Some add keywords to the title and company information to their description. I would say, even this would do better. Always give information for the visitor or searcher and get their interest, they would automatically click on your link once they are interested.
Make sure you have the best words visible on your META in the Search engine listing. Other than this, you dont have to worry much on META data.
hmm… I’ve never thought about this or heard or read. So this means you won’t actually rank when you use meta tags? That’s quite a shocker, although, in my opinion, meta tags are just one of the many ways you can help your site rank. I guess that alone won’t bring you to the top. In the end, it’s still the combination of all on-page and off-page factors.
SEO is not an exact science as the exact formulas are not known. Clearly the description tag plays into some description listings and it’s certainly possible they look at others to understand what context you say you’re about. Meta tags required honesty and when there’s money at stake honesty isn’t much of anything.
But no, adding a bunch of meta tags on their own will not get you any sort of ranking. Hasn’t worked that way for over a decade.
I am. 
For example:
Geo tags.
Propietory tags
Microdata
But I suspect that the op is more thinking along the lines of the oldend days where clever use of things like “keyword metatags” and the likes would propel your site to the top. The answer to that one is: forget it.
Can you give any more detail about HOW search engines use those tags? Are you talking about public search engines like Google or custom site searches? I’m particularly intrigued as to how Google might use proprietary meta tags…
Google increase the “trust value” if your pages are linked to your identity for example.
Mircro data work the same way.
Geo tags increase the importance of the site for nearby isp’s or mobile devices and reduce it for long distance.
right! i remember that you actually rank based on the votes you get. Votes mean backlinks - quality backlinks. Now that Google seems to be a hawk on sites having a bunch of them (most probably those who have unnatural links), it’s tougher to get better results with backlinking. This is why, IMO, people are more leaning towards on-page seo and creating more unique and not overly optimized contents.
“Meta tags required honesty and when there’s money at stake honesty isn’t much of anything.” - that’s really funny! I see your point in there. LOL!
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html Google writes about it.