Marketing & SEO Discussion List - LED Digest

> Our web master wants to build an include file with
> our keywords in it and then the same keywords will
> be on every page. Will this be considered spamming
> or have a negative impact on our search engine
> rankings or listings? Our site is crawled frequently
> by many spiders including Google."

This issue highlights a few important differences between Web development and SEO. For one thing, creating sites is all about efficiency: content management systems (CMS) allow sites to be online in record time, and they automate much of the process after going live. Why not think of automating meta tags in this model? SEO, however, is about rolling up your sleeves and trudging through the often tedious work of optimization - a word that signifies the uniquely custom nature of its purpose. I don't know of any short cuts in SEO that retain the kind of quality and ROI custom, professional SEO work will give you.

Just as I anticipated, an LEDer came to Andy's rescue with a great reply today. Here's part of it --

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The "keyword meta tag include" tactic is commonly implemented by webmasters and is completely useless for search engine rankings. It won't help you unless you have the same text on every page and that include uses ONLY text which appears on every page. Repeating keywords in meta tags which are not used on the page text is one reason search engines stopped giving them any weight in ranking algorithms.

It is like saying to the engines, "Here are the words I want to rank for - regardless of the fact that I don't use them on my site page text, embedded links text, headlines, title tags, directory structure or image files." This is also why many sites don't rank well - because webmasters are still thinking like it is 1999 when keyword meta tags still mattered to the search engines. Things have progressed way beyond that point now and many engines ignore, or at least discount those tags.

Webmasters are always reluctant to write individual PAGE title tags, individual PAGE keyword tags based on individual PAGE text and adjust individual page copy to rank well because they are not SEO's and it takes them too much time.

That is why they are webmasters - they enjoy building useful and attractive web sites with automation built in to ease site management. But that is also why they are not SEO's, because you can't automate Search Engine Optimization.