Metatags

You should be focused on updating your content, meta tags update won't change anything.

I agree. I rarely think about meta tags any more. I find that on my blogs, especially, Google will index the new pages often only a day later.

That's right Metatags don't matter much on Google.

Tip: Just do a search for your site and see what google brings: title .... and then just update or change them if you need to.

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Googlebot's crawling schedule for your site is generally determined by how often you update your content. It's got nothing to do with your META tags.

Here's a simplified version of how it would work...

1. Googlebot finds your webpage, and schedules when it's going to come back for a repeat visit.
2. If Googlebot finds new content on the page, it says "Hey! New content!", and schedules to come back a bit sooner next time.
3. If Googlebot finds new content on the page again, it says "Hey! New content!", and schedules to come back a bit sooner next time.

Basically, you train the spider to come back based on you content updates.

Another thing about Google, from Google's Webmaster Guidelines :
"Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead."

I just mention that, because you want to make it as easy as possible for Google...

As far as meta tags go, the only important one is description. Google will pull this tag and display it as the description in your site's listing in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Do a Google search for:
site:www.yourdomain.com

This will show you all the pages of your site that are in Google's index, and you'll be able to see the descriptions there.

Look at your meta description tags the same way you'd write a pay-per-click ad -- you want to entice searchers to click, so make it attractive.

John

Interesting [:)]
How about the other search engines. We still can say that metatags are less important. Beside the title content, what esle could be important for search engines. Thanks for input.

google (and most others) scrapped using meta tags many, many years ago.

True, meta tags do nothing for SEO. I don't know about the smaller search engines (but who cares?), but for the big 3 (Google, Yahoo, MSN Live) meta tags will do nothing for SEO.

As I mentioned earlier, your meta description is important, especially if you build your web pages the way that most people do...

If you look at the html for most sites, you'll see: head code, header image, top navigation, left navigation, then body content.

Without a meta description, search engines will just pull random text from the page, starting from the top of what the spiders see -- the code. This is why you sometimes see sites in the SERPs where the description shown is the text for their navigation...

Google, Yahoo, and MSN will show your meta description to different extents. For the most part, Google will show the meta description exactly, and Yahoo and MSN will show part of the description and maybe pull some other text from the page that's relevant to the keywords searched.

Meta descriptions are important simply for the fact that a good one will ensure a better clickthrough rate in the SERPs. It's just not good enough to have your page show in the SERPs if nobody's clicking...

For SEO, asides from title content, you're looking at optimizing your page content, and then it's all about getting inbound links -- not just quantity, but quality...

Cheers,
John

If your goal is to make Google think you are updating your website, you should update your content. Although, if you find your website ranking on the 3rd page for a keyword you are targeting, try changing your title for a shorter one and it should move up a bit.

Personally, I play around with my meta tags until I am happy with the result and if I don't get enough traffic to a specific page I sometimes change its title to reinforce another page I am linking to because relevancy matters. The same thing applies to anchor text. Try playing around with it too.