John had posted some interesting statistics based on his crawling of the IE namespace:
Websites With Title, Keywords and Description: 10460
That’s out of a corpus of 36198 domains!!
So, if John’s stats are true, and I have no reason to doubt him, approximately 66% of Irish websites have no meta content.
Some SEO experts may say that meta content is not as important as it used to be, however they would surely agree that TITLE tags are a necessity. Others would also opt in favour of using all available meta content, as it can help with your listing in some cases.
From reviewing sites submitted to browse.ie, search.ie and translationresearch.com I would have to agree.
In the case of the two Irish directories the quality of submissions is quite poor.
If they were being submitted to Skaffe , where I am also an editor, they would either be rejected or pushed between editors until the titles and descriptions had been beaten into an acceptable shape.
A lot of the Irish sites submitted are completely lacking in title tags, or all pages share the same ones, which is almost as bad.
As John points out, there is a definite need for SEO professionals in the Irish market. I wonder are people willing to pay them though….
i tend to argue that meta data *has* lost its imortance, that the key engines are reading the page and paying more attention to the anchor text of inward pointing links. *however* all i usually ignore in meta data is keywords – i’ll put in some site specific ones, and some to do with a page, but i no longer optimise the keywords of every single page (i use to use a doo-dah to do this for me). i would always use different meta title tags for each page, as well as the HTML title tag
But you would use TITLE tags correctly to optimise the site?
I would have to disagree with you about the other meta tags 🙂
yes i would use title tags to optimise a site. i *think* i tend to use them correctly 🙂
re “I wonder are people willing to pay them though…” – based on my own experience, the answer to that is no.
i also think that web-developers themselves need to take more responsibility for seo, that it shouldn’t be an extra layer in the web process.
The problem with handing it over to developers is that a lot of them will try to use even rudimentary SEO to hike up their prices.
Having said that, one of the main reasons that we choose 2bscene (http://www.2bscene.net) to redo our company site was because of their SEO experience.
i don’t specialise in seo, but i’m a web-developer who is very conscious of it. one of the issues i have always had with quite a few other web-developers is that they try to divorce themselves from the actuality of the site they’re working on, they don’t worry about the actual content, and they don’t worry about the way search engines will use the site (i think too many see that as a marketing role, and you know what most web-developers think of marketing). i would favour a world in which web-developers offered the full package, not for inflated prices, but for a fair price. using web-developers who don’t offer the full package is like empoying a builder to build a house for you and then having to employ a second builder in order to make sure the house can actually be lived in.
fmk – I’d tend to agree with you.
When we were looking for quotes last year for the redesign of the blacknight.ie site some of the responses were hilarious. I can understand that for some people web standards may still be secondary, but when we had specifically asked for compliance I found their attitude a bit mystifying.
All sites I worl on always get properly layed out semantic markup, page titles and meta tags by default, plus advice on changes of content where necessary. If they don’t they are getting ripped off. Its one of these things that a lot of the graphic design oriented web shops seem to miss completely.
IMO SEO / web-ranking companies charge way too much money for what is a very simple job (except iof course in a few of the highly contested areas – which are rare in my experience).
Optimising a site for the keywords related to our sector is “fun” 😛
The meta keywords are just not as important as valid content and properly place headers, strong important keywords.
The meta tags are just not as important as good valid content with strong keywords
Keith – the problem is that most of the people missing the meta content are also missing title tags and just about everything else. On search.ie, for example, I spider the listed links once every few weeks for meta content against which they may be searched. If it isn’t there it can’t be searched against.
Michele, your correct, do you work for a SEO company?
http://www.eirestudio.net
No – I run a hosting company (see my profile)
Michele – Would you like to exchange links?
Why would I want to exchange links??
Keith:
Its people like you i hate – adding your name (and URL) to these threads in order to increase your sites visibility (and attempting to bum some links aswell)….
Not the way tp promote your site, believe me !