meta keywords for SEO
 

When putting in meta keywords for say a "big cock" site, which of the following is better and why? Is there a better way than either?



META name="keywords" CONTENT="big cocks, massive dicks, huge cocks, large dicks">

Do SE's see single words or groups of words? Do commas affect things?

I use

The reason is because that is what my CoffeeCup html editor gives me when I insert the code for metas. I don't like the way that other version looks you have there, but I'm not sure if anything is wrong with it or not.

Are you asking if the SE's can see phrases as well? I'm not sure about commas, but have heard rumors about them being stop characters? I'm not sure on that tho, I've used both variations on that.

I use both:







"Description" for a sentence and "keywords" for words. I just don't know if words in keywords means individual words or if combinations or words works

This is a long story. SE Optimization is not something you can do within 3 minutes. Go and search a bit for it, read some articles and start testing it with a site which isn't that important and you can burn it at the se's. Just keep in mind, if you are going deeper into it, do not expect any good results within 6 months. Even you have optimized a page it could take month's before the results are getting reflect within the search engines

Hi Servhot.

I agree with what you say here, but Google is pretty quick about showing results of your changes imho. I think most of the other se's are very slow however. Just my 2 cents. |waves|

Well ya caught me. :D |waves| I was hoping someone with more SEO knowledge than me had already done some legwork and wouldn't mind sharing. I'm not lazy and don't mind searching, but if I have already done the legwork for something that might help someone else, I'll share what I know to save them some time. I may not be able to help the specific person that helped me, but what goes around comes around |goodidea "What we put into the lives of others will most surely come back into our own" (or something to that effect)

LOL I wonder if they have one of those "Dummies" books. I can see it now, "SEO For Dummies". |jester|

Wonder no more :)

http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/Dumm...88,page-1.html

|haha

I think the second version is way more likly to bring you surfers than the first, altho I would say you should choose somewhat rarer keyphrases than those.

There's still debate ongoing about the whole spaces and/or commas thing, but it's hard to prove it makes that much difference.

There are other debates you'll also hear about the meta keywords tag, but it's a fairly weak tag.

I like to use it in the way I think it was originally intended, as a place to put _additional_ keywords, mispellings, and alternative spellings.

More important - and deserves it own thread probably - is whether after the comma between phrase there should be a space or not :)

Go read Googles webmaster guidelines - it will tell you everything you need to know - that it doesnt matter one way or the other is fine - the closer you can make it to compliant html the better it is


BTW - there will be people that tell you that keywords dont matter to Google - they dont use them anyway - You have my permission (not that you need it) to yell BS as loud as you can cause they have started using them again :)

This is really not a long story - this forum is here specifically for questions like these - because we are helpful people around here and some of more successful at the SE game (we are not SEOs- they suck) just love to give back to our community

And BTW - your timeline is way off - it takes about 3 days to get a good listing in Google nowadays

Wherezat?

Thanks! |thumb I also got a PM with another site to look at...time to read.

Even w3 seems a little confused about that...

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4

Gives these two examples on the same page:

<-- For speakers of US English -->
content="vacation, Greece, sunshine">
<-- For speakers of British English -->
content="holiday, Greece, sunshine">
<-- For speakers of French -->
content="vacances, Grèce, soleil">

and









What do you figure is the "approved" method, Linkster?

It's been considered a weak tag for a long time, so I don't think people cared all that much, and I've personally seen Yahoo respond with results for rare keywords in the tag using all three possible methods - space only, comma only, and comma space.

But with google's newish use of the metas, it may become more of an issue.

Yahoo still indexes META keywords. The ranking boost, however, is marginal. META keywords are useful for targetting low hanging fruits, though ineffective when optimizing for competitive terms, because off-page factors in that case would overshadow any on-page factors, especially factors like META keywords tag or HTML comments that are invisible to surfers and are prone to spam attempts.

There's a powerful on-page factor you can use to nail a #1 position on Google for mildly competitive terms. Hint: it's not the META keyword tag.

A few words from Google:
http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html

The fact Google ignores META keywords is easy to test, though if you think you have examples that prove otherwise I'd love to see it.

META keywords is good for one thing. It's a great substitute for ICRA tags. Google uses words it finds in the META keywords tag to detect pages with adult images.

By low hanging fruits do you mean "easily accessible" (one of the meanings of that phrase) or "at the end of the branch"?

My model of how to use the keywords tag is to use it for rarer alternatives of your primary keywords, under the theory that it adds little to nothing to the ranking of the "real" keywords on the page.

I kinda figured Linkster was talking about the rumors of google using the metas as part of their newer spam detection algos.

By low hanging fruits, I mean queries that many people don't aggressively optimize for. For example, allintitle:britney shears returns only 281 results. Right now, that term should be relatively easy to rank for (in the worst case you'd start at 282nd in the SERP), as opposed to allintitle:free porn, which returns ~1,040,000 results.

Oh, ok. I haven't heard anything about that. Google definitely doesn't ignore the META keywords tag. Of course, that's different from saying that using the META keywords tag improves Google ranking.

I love it when people make up "facts" |jester|

I'm just starting to get into this stuff, but WTF did that mean? |loony| If Google doesn't ignore meta keyword tags, that means Google uses them for something, and the only thing Google does is rank web sites. So, if Google doesn't ignore them, but they don't improve ranking, what does Google do with them? |huh

In the beginning the Keyword was born and it was GOOD and all upon the landscape everyone cried what a marvelous thing it was.

Soon EVIL came to the land and captured the Keyword and charmed it with incantations and made the Keyword do the bidding of EVIL. As a result Keyword lost all its respect and power amongst the people because none would now believe in it as Keyword was seen as the agent of EVIL. All ran far and fast away from Keyword wanting to have nothing to do with it lest they become evil too.

After awhile, EVIL became bored toying and torturing Keyword and cast it aside as a used up and empty shell of its former glory. Languishing alone and hideous to look upon, all ignored Keyword as Keyword was blamed for what EVIL had really done. Sad, lonely, and abandoned by EVIL, Keyword wandered from place to place begging for its sustenence and looking for a home, no one wanted Keyword.

After a time, there was some talk about EVIL and it was remembered how beautiful and helpful and nobel Keyword had been before Evil had befallen it. It was even thought by some that Keyword had been released by EVIL and had been seen wandering here and there seeking a port of comfort but never finding any.

After some more time, a new air began to blow across the landscape and people began to feel badly for how they had treated Keyword and unfairly blamed it for the doings of Evil. Forgiveness was being encouraged and all now wanted to apologize and embrace Keyword and bring Keyword back into the family, perhaps even in new and interesting ways. There was now exciting talk in every corner of the land about Keyword once again and it was GOOD.

LOL DJilla that's a classic.

For one thing, like I posted before, if you use adult keywords in your META keywords tag, Google will filter your page out of results when SafeSearch strict is active. Google will also filter your images out of Google Images unless SafeSearch is turned off.

Another quick answer here - and I really dont care what the "experts" say - I only base my points on my own testing and results

Google does use the keywords meta - not just for anti-spam detection - as part of their ranking algo - and have for the last 4 months at least - there is no question in my mind about it.

Thanks all, I've done some reading and will use meta keywords, without commas for a while.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...me&btnG=Search

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...bs&btnG=Search

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache...ient=firefox-a

I'm aching to be convinced otherwise.

---

There's no harm in using the META keywords tag as long as you don't spam the hell out of it. I sometimes use it to help myself remember what I optimized a page for.

Those first two URL's gave me this:

Your search - site:http://www.searchenginelabs.com/ genome - did not match any documents.

Your search - genome inurl:searchenginelabs - did not match any documents.

Spam? No, I was thinking something like this for meta keywords:



It's basically a sentence but each word stands alone as a relevant word for a "big cock" site.

And for meta description:

That's Halfdecks point, Licker4u, the searches show no results for a page that he's saying is cached for a meta keywords test.

What led you to decide to use spaces instead of commas?

I said earlier there's a lot of ongoing debate about the keywords tag. At a certain point you just gotta make your choice and take your chances.

It's a weak tag. I think it barely matters what you put there. And you can do without it on most pages.

However, If you are going to use it, I would say it should be unique for every page you use it on. That's because of the spam detection potential of the meta tags.

It's a pity he/she/they couldn't even get the structure of an HTML page right... thereby making the experiment completely useless.

DD

I've heard that both have their benefits, but their flaws are almost too hard to ignore, let alone recognize & put to good use in the environment of SE html page production



|couch|

I missed that...

One of the Google articles I read recently said they aren't necessary....I think.

Huh. It does look like the tag is malformed.

and out of order....

Dave, good eye, but I don't grasp your logic:

- META keywords tag is "malformed"
- TITLE and META element in the header is out of place.
- So Googlebot didn't index the page correctly.

Assuming Googlebot will choke on minor validation errors - That's a big leap of faith. Though I think WC3 validaton does have some merit (from what I've seen Googlebot sometimes fail to find the meat of a page if HTML is too convoluted) you're assuming that Googlebot will trip up on that META tag just because there are spaces between name, =, and "keywords." That's a big assumption.

A majority of websites have validaton errors. Some errors will trip up Googlebot, according to a googler:

http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html

But in general, Googlers insist their bot is extremely flexible. I personally doubt that (they also said they are "pretty good" at spotting duplicate content but then wtf is this?) but I don't believe META tags out of order is enough to confuse the simplest of scripts. Their bot needs to be extremely forgiving, because otherwise it will fail to index 40% of the web:

- Matt Cutts

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-an...-google-video/

Assuming Google choked on that test page due to META positioned ahead of the TITLE attribute (its not mine, btw), nothing should come up for words in the TITLE attribute or on-page text.

Anyway, here's another example:

http://www.britney.com/, which ranks #4 for "britney spears."

It's got Flash on the home page and no actual textual content (besides keywords in the TITLE).

Here's the META keywords tag:



Kevin federline

Kevin Federline (without quotes)

Britney spears foundation

-------

So I guess now google can actually play a swf and retrieve the words spoken or sung in the flash?

Since the words only show up in the keywords:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...%3Abritney.com

Interesting,

but how do you explain this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...om&btnG=Search

I don't know much about how Google indexes Flash. but I think that the META keywords is reproduced in the Flash file somewhere, along with dupe bio text.

According to this page about SEOing SWF files, I can use the Adobe search engines SDK to extract indexable text from flash files.

So I downloaded the SDK, downloaded the britney.swf and this is what I pulled:

http://www.nastyxvids.com/google-flash/britney.html
(url is temporary, noindexed and nofollowed)

Partial Extract:

So it looks like we cant prove anything one way or the other - guess we will have to base our search engine work on what works for our own sites - I know the keywords meta effects my sites so Ill leave them where they are :)