Is Dynamic Meta Tags A Good Idea ?

Dose enigines Like Google and Yahoo give those sites priority ?

If its A Good Idea What Are The Do's and Don'ts?

What do you mean by dynamic?
Do you mean to get the meta data from a database, Or do you mean change the meta data every time the page is loaded?

If you are getting meta data from a database and then echoing it out with php search engines would never know, They dont know what is from XML, a database or hard coded. They just get the HTML produced by your server side scripts.

If you mean change the meta data every time the page is loaded, That would be a bad idea. Search engines would more than likely see this as some kind of trick because if th meta data keeps changing it can't be very accurate.

By the way, Google pays little to no attention to meta tags.

And as far as meta tags are concerned in general they're not going to have much impact at all in where your pages rank.

You should write a good description since many times it will be your description that will be displayed beneath your link in the results. It may have a minor effect if you use keywords in your description, but not enough that should worry about it at all.

The meta keywords tag is close to useless. You can find just as many people who think you're better off not using them as you can find people thinking you should use them. They really won't help your rank at all, but there's nothing wrong with using them if you want. I wouldn't spend more than a minute or two thinking about them though.

I'm also not sure what you mean by dynamic mata tags though I agree with stOx on both of the possibilites he mentioned.

Originally Posted by vangogh

The meta keywords tag is close to useless.

I agree, and many search engines don’t even look at Meta tags anymore. Because of abuse by many websites.

meta tags do help a little, don't vchange them too often though, no more than once every week or two

Changing your meta tags every week or two doesn't make much sense. It's qulte likely you won't see the results from any change for a few weeks so you would really have no way of knowing which of your changes were really having any affect positive or negative.

And there really isn't going to be a benefit to the meta keyword tag. There is probably more of a chance they can hurt you if you don't use them properly than they can help you if you do.

Originally Posted by dougadam

I agree, and many search engines don’t even look at Meta tags anymore. Because of abuse by many websites.

I though keywords was the base for the whole search engines.

If keywords is history then what works ? totally shocked.

by the way i was talking about grabbing meta data from the database. which will be static and not change every time the page loads.

Keywords are what people type into a search engine to find something.

meta keywords is an html tag that are supposed to describe what the page is about.

In an ideal world if you created a page about 'blue widgets' your meta keywords tag would contain the term 'blue widgets' It would help search engines determine what your page is about and direct people searching for the term 'blue widgets' to your site.

Unfortunately the tag has been abused for so long it doesn't work like it's supposed to.

People discovered that instead of honestly using the term 'blue widgets' they could get more traffic by using the 'brittany spears' or some other term that gets searched a lot. Of course since the page isn't about Brittany it's pointless to show it in search results for the term. It didn't take long for search engines to realize they couldn't trust the tag at all.

when someone says keywords though it doesn't mean they're referring to the meta keywords tag. Two different things, but unfortunately the share the common word which can make it confusing.

Hope that helps clear it up some.

I think search engines these days just check to see if you have meta tags and move mon. After a lot of meta tag spamming they decided to use their own information.

Thank You

I totally agree with vangogh. Meta tags are useless atleast with google.

Originally Posted by vangogh

Keywords are what people type into a search engine to find something.

meta keywords is an html tag that are supposed to describe what the page is about.

In an ideal world if you created a page about 'blue widgets' your meta keywords tag would contain the term 'blue widgets' It would help search engines determine what your page is about and direct people searching for the term 'blue widgets' to your site.

Unfortunately the tag has been abused for so long it doesn't work like it's supposed to.

People discovered that instead of honestly using the term 'blue widgets' they could get more traffic by using the 'brittany spears' or some other term that gets searched a lot. Of course since the page isn't about Brittany it's pointless to show it in search results for the term. It didn't take long for search engines to realize they couldn't trust the tag at all.

when someone says keywords though it doesn't mean they're referring to the meta keywords tag. Two different things, but unfortunately the share the common word which can make it confusing.

Hope that helps clear it up some.

Vow , That was well explained, and hey i saw your article that you had taken part in the contest,,, that was also too good.

I liked it,,,,and thanks for the information.


Regards/Puneet M

Glad to help and glad you liked the article. If I'm not mistaken you commented on it too.

Originally Posted by darshdude

Is Dynamic Meta Tags A Good Idea ?

Dose enigines Like Google and Yahoo give those sites priority ?

If its A Good Idea What Are The Do's and Don'ts?

I have found that SOMETIMES Google uses my Meta Tags for their description and others they use my content. I have started to use dynamic META tags and the search engines have yet to impletment them but I cannot see how it can hurt to use them.

What are you hoping to achieve with dynamic meta tags? Are we talking about the meta keywords tag, the meta description tag, or both?

Google will sometimes use the meta description in the snippet they show in results. They may also use your DMOZ description if you have a listing there and they might also use some text they grab from the page. It all depends on the query used and Google is generally trying to grab words from the query.

Originally Posted by darshdude

I though keywords was the base for the whole search engines.

If keywords is history then what works ? totally shocked.

...

by the way i was talking about grabbing meta data from the database. which will be static and not change every time the page loads.

Keywords are more or less how search engines work, in a narrow sense. But those keywords come from the text on your page, not the ones in the meta tag in the head section of the page.

If you pull the data from a database, write it out in Notepad, or use PHP to echo hard coded strings, Google won't know the difference. All they'll see is the html that gets rendered by whatever process you choose. So it's the quality of what you write, and not the technique you choose, that matters ... like most of seo.

Back to your original question, there really aren't any dos and don'ts to this approach ... except maybe use a spell check, and write meta descriptions that will make a person want to click your page.

Although now that we're on the subject, does anybody know how many characters the meta desc field can be?