Here is a new website optimisation / SEO service that we hadn’t seen before ‘Meta Tag Creation’. It seems some companies are offering to code the meta tags for your website and was interested enough to see what came back from one of these services, the following is the details received from such a company, accompanied by our thoughts
We are contacting you regarding your purchase of Meta Tag Creation for your web site
As agreed with your Account Manager we have compiled and included with this e-mail the completed Meta Data for you to upload to your site.
The completed tags to be uploaded to the specified pages are shown below. [We say: no pages are give] Prior to uploading these tags to your web site, it is recommended that copies of any existing pages are made. Should you use a Content Management System, or similar, it will be necessary to copy the title and meta tags from the attached pages before entering them into your site’s CMS. Instructions as to how this is achieved should be available within the documentation for your particular CMS.
However, as a goodwill gesture we are happy to upload the meta tags on your behalf. To do this we would require the FTP details to the web site, which should have been sent to you by your hosting provider, consisting of a “hostname”, “username” and “password”. Please note we can only upload the meta tags if we can gain access to your web site. If you wish for us to upload the Meta Tags, please send an e-mail including the FTP details from your hosting provider. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact our Technical Team
Meta Tags
<title>[Company Name] – wedding dresses essex, bridesmaid dresses essex, wedding gowns essex, formal hire wedding suits essex, bridal wear essex</title>
We say: Cardinal Sin of the Title tag is wasting the first word with the company name, unless your a multinational ‘brand’ this is a waste of space, if you must have your company name put it at the end of the tag. Additionally they have included 120 characters where it should be 70 maximum. They have repeated the county 5 times which is simply spammy.
<meta name=”description” content=”[Company Name] offering wedding dresses essex, bridesmaid dresses essex, wedding gowns essex, formal hire wedding suits essex, bridal wear essex” />
We say: This comes in at 125 Characters where you should be aiming for 150, especially if this is a paid for service, additionally the Description is your chance to sell your company and this description is nothing more than a list of search term.
<meta name=”keywords” content=”[Company Name], wedding dresses essex, bridesmaid dresses essex, wedding gowns essex, formal hire wedding suits essex, bridal wear essex” />
We say: Even though keywords are next to useless, Google ignores them, the common search terms are included but again the county is repeated too many times and appears ‘spammy’.
<meta name=”copyright” content=”[Company Name]” />
We say: Not needed / no SEO benefit at all
<meta name=”author” content=”Optimised by [Another SEO Company Name]” />
We say: Not needed / no SEO benefit at all in this advert!
<meta http-equiv=”expires” content=”” />
We say: Not needed / no SEO benefit at all
<meta http-equiv=”charset” content=”ISO-8859-1″ />
We say: W3C recommends Unicode encoding as UTF-8
<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”English” />
We say: This is a .co.uk domain hosted in the UK for UK customers so pretty worthless
<meta http-equiv=”vw96.object type” content=”Document” />
We say: not recognised by the search engines and obsolete
<meta name=”rating” content=”General” />
We say: Not needed / no SEO benefit at all
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” />
We say: These are the default statements and do not achieve anything
<meta name=”revist-after” content=”7 days” />
We say: The days of telling the googlebot what to do are gone
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html” />
We say: Can and should be combined with Charset like this <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
They supplied only one lot of meta tags and presumably expect you to load it on the index page, meta tag optimisation is an important part of our SEO projects and one that should be done carefully and with expert SEO knowledge. Judging by the meta tags created above you will need to be wary of companies offering this type of service. If you want your website optimised and promoted there is limited benefit in just updating the meta tags (especially if its done poorly like the example above). You need to attack SEO in a holistic way, meaning there are many factors to consider before simply updating meta tags.
The moral of the story in this SEO post is ‘look at the big picture’ SEO Gurus are not introverted, or this one isn’t anyway 🙂
