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Sure they're worth the effort - but they're not what they used to be. Certainly you can find a lot of content with diverse opinions floating around on the Internet and review the whole "death of the meta tag" era, but description and even keywords meta tags are still, at least for me, a small part of good seo standard practices.
Description meta tags are actually used, often in the description blurb that appears beneath the title in SERPs. Keywords meta tags are often just thrown in for good measure but aren't specifically useful in any real way these days.
Here's sphinns description, right!
meta name="description" content="Sphinn is the place for web, online, search, interactive and internet marketers to share news stories, talk within subject-specific discussion forums, build a network and stay informed of upcoming events."
So if you hop on over to Google and type site:sphinn.com into the query box, you'll see that first result uses that same description beneath the link title.
There are a lot of other totally useless meta tags out there, though. I just Sphunn a story about that - Worthless Meta Tags used by SEO Companies which appeared on SearchEngineJournal today. Here's the story on Sphinn: http://sphinn.com/story.php?id=18582
The DMOZ is allegedly full of corruption, it's back-logged, it's often down... but it still never hurts to obtain the nice listing in the proper category if for no other reason than also reaching the multitude of other niche directories that draw their listings from the ODP.
This is a great tutorial! The next time someone asks me about using Yahoo Pipes I'll direct them straight to David's video.
Of course it only applies to the lucky few who garner sitelinks within their listings. Still, nice of them to let those sites take away anything they don't want to see offered in the SERP.
I've been pulling for ASK to step it up a notch and surprise those 'other three' since they dropped Jeeves. When Jeeves was watching the door I hated the results page so fervently I couldn't force myself to search there.
What I like about ASK is that they don't seem to follow the leader (per se) but instead actually offer unique angles. And with exception of the algorithm commercials I've liked their ad campaigns. The latest TV ads actually offer real incentive to go and try it out by showing the process in a way everyone can relate to. They also have a great kid search for those of us with young folks looking for homework answers and fun sites to visit.
What I don't like about ASK is that the results often feel more outdated and that they seem slow to recognize redirects and update their index. I think I'll go grab the ASK toolbar and try a Google-less Friday tomorrow to give it another true test run.
A nice comprehensive look at keyword research and ways to keep yourself focused on the big picture. I regularly use Topix.net and Google Trends during the keyword research process and even for doing quick checks to help narrow it down when I've got two or three choices I'm considering. Here's a summary snippet from Searching Search Histories: Trends and Topix that I wrote last September:
Since then, Google Trends is now updated every day and you can often get a decent graph of trend history even for the past 30 days. They've also added a top ten hot trends to the page with a link to the top hundred and a change date option as well.Use Google Trends to:
- discover what geographic region searches more for a particular term
- compare search popularity among five terms at a time
- view how the popularity of a term has grown over a longer period of time than a year
Use Topix.net to:
- look at the most recent, up-to-date popularity news trends for a particular term
- have more control over case sensitive searches
- more easily eliminate what you don't want to see in the search results
- visualize trends in news and/or blogs
I'll submit one for that top ten list:
Not too long ago we noticed a client who had achieved solid rankings slipping a bit in the SERPs. Looking closely, we noticed that another URL they owned was now a live site on the same server which, of course, was an exact duplicate of the site they already had up and ranking.
I think what made it so frustrating on our end is that we pride ourselves on our due diligence during the exploration and discovery phases and 1) they'd informed us that they owned that 2nd domain simply to keep anyone else from owning it and 2) they'd decided not to do anything with it and had assured us that they'd be sure to redirect it to the primary URL or contact us for advice based on their intentions if they changed their minds.
After a deep breath and a few walks around the office we had only loving words of advice for our client to help mitigate the damages after they shot themselves in the foot.
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Story: Are META Tags Useful?