Meta tags and google

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If Google no longer use Meta tags can I omit them all together ?
Also how do you work your way up the listings?? is it the more hits you have or somthing??
As you can tell from post I really dont have a clue with this :D

Thanks
 

daz

daz

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Google might omit meta tags, but including them doesn't really cost you anything. Other search engines still do take account of meta tags, so why throw away a small amount of potential visitors by not including them?

Getting high in Google is about getting links in to your site. The more, better quality sites that link to your site, the higher you'll find your site in Google's rankings. Anchor text is massively important with this.
 
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How do you know Google omits meta tags?

Google doesn't omit them. In most cases, it uses your description tag in the SERPs, and there is strong evidence to show that keywords in the description tag carry good hit weight.

Remember too that Google is not the only search engine.
 
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Keywords meta tag: only. Not used any more by any of the major search engines as it was abused too much and not a quality indicator of site content.

Other meta tags are very important to google. Description is what appears beneath your SERP link.

Work your way up the listing by building a well structured website, using your keywords in the page title, url and body text with regular content updates and links back into your site from other highly ranked websites.

These are all easy if you have a legitimate concept that can draw traffic.
 

daz

daz

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Apologies - read the OP too fast. You're absolutely right - it's imperative to make good use of title and description tags especially. Description tags, as you say are used by google and can greatly influence your click through rate from the SERPs through to your site. It's great appearing high in search rankings, but if people aren't clicking through and you're turning people off before they even hit your site then it's something you need to look at...

A better description could turn your click through rate from 1% to 2%, and double the number of visitors from that search term - without even putting any extra effort into getting higher in the rankings through link building and all that other stuff.
 
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Google might omit meta tags, but including them doesn't really cost you anything. Other search engines still do take account of meta tags, so why throw away a small amount of potential visitors by not including them?

Getting high in Google is about getting links in to your site. The more, better quality sites that link to your site, the higher you'll find your site in Google's rankings. Anchor text is massively important with this.

so would a page of links to quality sites get a site higher in the rankings?

yesterday friends site was on page 5 of listings and today it has gone cant be found?? I think he left this code out:
<title><?php wp_title('&laquo;', true, 'right'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
would that effect listing if it was missing ??

it is the only thing I can think off that changed
 
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If he removed the title tags then yes, that would severely hinder its ranking with Google.. Title tag is a key indicator of page content.

And a site linking to quality sites is the wrong way round. We are saying if you want to get higher you need high quality inbound links. So people linking to you from their amazing websites.
 
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If he removed the title tags then yes, that would severely hinder its ranking with Google.. Title tag is a key indicator of page content.

And a site linking to quality sites is the wrong way round. We are saying if you want to get higher you need high quality inbound links. So people linking to you from their amazing websites.

we have put the Tags back in the header.php would we now need to resubmit site ??
having links to other sites has no gain at all ?? I assumed it would as it was anchor text??
I was also thinking, could it be just that it was a freshbot that trawled the site and we need to wait for a deep search to be done to get permanent listing??

thanks for the help really appreciated ;)
 
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we have put the Tags back in the header.php would we now need to resubmit site ??
having links to other sites has no gain at all ?? I assumed it would as it was anchor text??
I was also thinking, could it be just that it was a freshbot that trawled the site and we need to wait for a deep search to be done to get permanent listing??

thanks for the help really appreciated ;)

No need to resubmit. You could submit a sitemap, which helps with your last question. Deep site searches sometimes never happen and a sitemap is the best way to let google know about all of your pages. Look at Google's webmaster tools.

Links going out are fine. Its important to become part of the "the web" literally. But they won't give you the rewards in the rankings as the inbound links do.

The premise is quite simple and wonderful. If you have content worth seeing, people will link to it from all sorts of sites. That means your site is more important. The actuality is that most content is rubbish, or you are trying to push a product, which makes link building much harder.
 
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