I have a couple of questions about meta tags

[Kate]

I was wondering if I could have some advice, thoughts on the following
questions:

1. Do you need to use & in meta tags or are you just able to write "&"?
At present I use the &

2. And secondly how many characters or words should your description and
keywords be. I've read so much conflicting POV's on this topic. I have
read in a few place the more key words the better, but then it's not always
possible as some search engines only allow x amount of words, characters.

Many thanks in advance,
Kate

 

[Steve Pugh]

I was wondering if I could have some advice, thoughts on the following
questions:

1. Do you need to use & in meta tags or are you just able to write "&"?
At present I use the &

Same rules as anywhere else in HTML. If the character after the &
could be start of an entity then use &, if the character can't be
the start of an entity then you can leave it as & but it's recommended
that you always use &

2. And secondly how many characters or words should your description and
keywords be. I've read so much conflicting POV's on this topic. I have
read in a few place the more key words the better, but then it's not always
possible as some search engines only allow x amount of words, characters.

For keywords the number is however many your internal site search tool
needs. Search engines generally ignore keywords these days so there's
little point in including them unless you use them internally.

For description Google seems to display about 160 characters so that
seems like a reasonable starting point.

Steve

 

[Kate]

Same rules as anywhere else in HTML. If the character after the &
could be start of an entity then use &, if the character can't be
the start of an entity then you can leave it as & but it's recommended
that you always use &


For keywords the number is however many your internal site search tool
needs. Search engines generally ignore keywords these days so there's
little point in including them unless you use them internally.

For description Google seems to display about 160 characters so that
seems like a reasonable starting point.

Steve

Many thanks Steve for the reply, I must say I didn't realise that some
search engines ignore keywords. Is this because they use what is on the
page itself by scanning it's content?

Many thanks,
Kate

 

[Bernhard Sturm]

Many thanks Steve for the reply, I must say I didn't realise that some
search engines ignore keywords. Is this because they use what is on the
page itself by scanning it's content?

It's because you can easily fake meta tags, and the content of the meta
tags doesn't need to be associated with the content of your page. AFAIK
google doesn't only look at your content in order to place you in their
rankings, but more on how many times your site is being linked from
other sites.
Correct me if I am wrong.

bernhard

 

[Big Bill]

Many thanks Steve for the reply, I must say I didn't realise that some
search engines ignore keywords. Is this because they use what is on the
page itself by scanning it's content?

Many thanks,
Kate

Most engines ignore keywords. Yahoo will notice them on occasion
though so it's best to leave them in and keep them pertinent to the
page. Every little helps in SEO!

BB