Move over Meta Keywords. Hot Tags are here.

Meta keywords have been obsolete for many years and now, at last they are beginning to fall out of favour with web developers. Yipee! This is the best news since donald rumsfeld got fired.

The problem with keyword meta tags is they can be manipulated to influence search engines to return misleading results. So they were dropped by almost every search engine. Garbage in, garbage out.

Many people believe that they can't hurt so put them in anyway. But meta tags some have adverse effects that are not generally considered:

Firstly, meta tags are placed in the top of your document which pushes all your content downwards. This is not likely to effect a web page much at all but it would only have a negative effect if any. Google devotes 12 bits (4096) of information to the position of your key words in your document. It's good practice to get all you important stuff to the top and the useless stuff to the bottom. So delete meta tags.

Secondly, Meta tags slow down Content Management Systems. Joomla 1.0x devotes two TEXT fields in its MySQL database to both the keyword and description meta tags. That's a whopping 65 535 characters of useless information in every row of your content table. The first modification I make is to get rid of these or change them to VARCHAR 255 in any CMS.

Thirdly, Meta tags only benefit your competitors. When I am researching keywords I often look at these to get a snapshot of my client's competitors marketing strategy. Thank you very much! Of course, it is best to invest your time promoting your own business and to try something that might work.

What are these hot tags?

Hot tags are the same idea as meta tags but you put them where people can read them. Technically the term "Hot Tag" is slang. It's an idea rather than a piece of code. This idea exploits the fact that search engines only ready text on the document where the user can see it (rather than behind it, in code) and makes use of that in graphic design.

Google measures the relative text sizes of each word in your document (this is why it's good to use <H> tags). Google also records the text in the link that is displayed on your web page. So if you incorporate these ideas into your design you'll get positive results from search engine. Actually, you will see them on the left of this page (if my designer doesn't move them).

For more info:
The Death of Meta Tags

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

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