Website, does the description and keywords have to be in the home page?

karen_jewels

hi there:

I have a website and the person who is doing the website told me that I have to have the Description of the website and the keywords on the home page. (not hidding, but there, so everyone will see it)
I dont think that makes a lot of sense, and it doesnt look professional. but I was wondering what do you think about this?
Thanks a lot


Karen

matu

hi Karen, the description and keywords are not actually seen on the webpage itself. Instead there is a html tag in the code called a meta tag which stores information about your website,

For example this is the meta tag info on boards.ie.....
<title>Website, does the description and keywords have to be in the home page? - boards.ie/vbulletin</title>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta name="generator" content="vBulletin 3.0.8" />
<meta name="keywords" content="ireland,irish,chat,forum,bbs,discussion,bulletin board" />
<meta name="description" content="boards.ie - 1000 monkeys... 1000 typewriters..." />
<meta name="license" content="85e38801fe5052dbe3bf6196098a8b813c1ad047"/>

you can see the keyboards are, ireland, chat and so forth so if you had a shop that sells clothes your keywords would be along the lines of mens, womens, fashion....

Talliesin

FWIW keywords are widely ignored these days. No harm doing them, but your time could generally be better spent looking at something else.

DonkeyStyle \o/

karen_jewels wrote:

I have a website and the person who is doing the website told me that I have to have the Description of the website and the keywords on the home page. (not hidding, but there, so everyone will see it)
I dont think that makes a lot of sense, and it doesnt look professional. but I was wondering what do you think about this?
Thanks a lot

I think he might have been talking about how google indexes pages by text that actually appears in the body text, as opposed to keywords listed in meta-tags.
As far as my understanding of google goes, I think he/she's right... but it's not as simple as just plopping a load of keywords in the body of the page... it's more contextual than that, so a good description of what your site is all about would be the intended idea... read the ranking info on the google website, they explain it a lot better.

I agree with you though, putting a list of keywords in the body text would look stupid... I think I read that the google bots can detect how prominently these words appear aswell, so you wouldn't really get away with hiding them (afaik).

rsynnott

Is the person doing your page a putrid "SEO"?

(I prefer the DMOZ term; SERP Perp)