Meta tags are important for rankings
People who believe this one tend to be those who remember the days of old, when meta tags, hidden text, and <!-- Comment Spamming --> were common.
Those people tend to forget, though, that search engines have become significantly more accurate since then, and there’s a reason. Search engines have realized the key to good results is eliminating factors that can be too easily manipulated by site owners and Webmasters.
In that vein, meta keyword tags have lost nearly all value; in fact, only Inktomi still factors them into their ranking algorithm, and they have admitted that their value is all but negligible.
If you want to test for yourself, there is an easy way to test: set up a Web page with meta keyword text not found anywhere in the body of the page. Submit to Google, and then search in site: for the meta text. You won’t get any results!
Description tags, similarly, do not hold much importance for ranking specifically, but they do have some value -- search engines tend to include meta description text on results pages.
Now that we’ve established that meta tags aren’t important for ranking, I’ll recommend that you include them anyway. They aren’t very important, but they sure can’t hurt, and they’re not much work to include.
Search engines can’t index dynamic content
For years, the major search engines failed to index dynamic content. That’s changed, though!
Unfortunately, the ability to index dynamic content should not be confused with a tendency to index all dynamic content. Search engines are hesitant when they run into query strings (after the “?” in a URL); they can be thrown into infinite loops by these types of pages, and, for the sake of their own resources and so they don’t bring servers to their knees, spiders don’t index all dynamic content.
It’s not a guessing game, though -- by keeping query variables (e.g., ?var=value) short and few, you can increase spiders’ chances of indexing dynamic pages.
Also, avoid sessions; spiders won’t index pages with session IDs because these pages don’t really exist at any specific URL. Spiders are smarter than you think; they know that!
To put it simply, don’t let search engines prevent you from building dynamic sites. Just pay attention to my guidelines and you should be fine.
Next: Myths Three, Four, and Five >>
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