A question in today from Denis Baker at Aventure Lingusitique in Geneva - “can you have too many meta tags?”
Yes, you can have too many meta tags. The actual use of meta tags are deprecated by most search engines; and we are unsure as to their relevancy these days. There are sites with top rankings that have no meta data and sites with top rankings that do. What we are sure of is that the Google database only holds 250 characters for each meta tag - which amounts to 5 to 8 keyword phrases.

You should be targeting only that many.

An important point though is that different pages can have different keyword targets; your home page will be most generic - “study English overseas” etc., but your pages about your US schools will have different focus - “learn English in the US” - and hence variations of the met tags. Denis’ strategy of a core set, plus page specific keywords is exactly right. The core set should be quite specific and selected for search volume and competition.

I actually did some work with Denis on researching his keyword bundle. It was very interesting as his site is targeted toward French speakers and my French can get me a coffee, a beer and a lay (theoretically). What transpired though was that the language and indeed the word was irrelevant and we were able to build up a great set of keywords through following methodical steps researching search volumes and competitor numbers. Good luck with the business mate!

Tags: keywords, SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 4:10 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.