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I have been trying to optimise our meta tag keywords, thanks mainly to the useful hints in this site, but have a question :
If I have a good keyword phrase like "location restaurant" in the meta tag, do I need also to have the individual keywords "location" and "restaurant"? I realise you shouldn't use the same keyword too much or it may be seen as spamming, and I would prefer to have something like "location restaurant, location eating, location dining" than use the word on it's own. So does google see the individual words in the phrase or is it better to use them combined and alone?
Any comments for a poor beginner?
PS : our website is not about restaurants or eating, but the location keyword is the most important for sure, and I don't want to waste it!
Meta keywords aren't tallied by G.
Next, you need to sit back and contemplate the meaning of the term "optimization."
Optimization is presenting a web page in a manner that makes it easy for a spider to define what your site is about, and thus, what it's relevant for.
Seen in this context, adding words about eating or restaurant, to a site that is about neither, is counterproductive.
Yes, I am not actually going to add the keywords "restaurant" or "eating" to my site. That was just an example. Guess I should have used "widgets" like everyone else. All I want to know is does Google or any other engine for that matter see 2 keywords together or just a phrase.
Ive thought about it as well.
All i can say is that ive stayed away from repeating my keywords and gone for listing each keyword seperately - with a comma in between (listed in order of importance).
So instead of blue widgets, i use blue, widgets.
The sites i use this in seem to be ranking well (but of course there are a million and one other factors to take into account).
My theory is that if you list the keywords one by one, then they can be matched up in a search in multiple combinations, but if you have keywords paired in phrases then you are limiting the possible combinations. Eg,
Keyword1, Keyword2
- gives you 4 combinations: keyword1, keyword2, keyword1 keyword2, keyword2 keyword1.
However - Keyword1 Keyword2 (as a single phrase) only gives you one combination.
This is assuming Google looks at pairs of words as a seperate entity from the single words. Otherwise it doesnt matter and its the order in which you list that is important.
JOAT
The Death Of A Meta Tag [sewatch.com] - it should answer your questions :)
Danny Sullivan says:
Now I can make my advice about the meta keywords tag even easier. Just don't use the tag at all! Obviously, if you personally find it or believe it to be useful, keep doing so. But I suspect it's just a waste of time, for most people.
A while ago, many WebmasterWorld member suggested that Meta keyword and description were pretty useless... and like a kid in a candy shop -- I had to try it!
Since that time I can honestly say -- the bulk majority of web pages rose dramatically in SERP's.
Putting in context -- each page started capturing many more "less competitive" keyphrases that were much more "on-target" to precise page content. Only 1 or 2 uses per day, but now at 18,000+ keyphrases this is sizable amount of traffic by themselves.
The only real change that occurred to each page was file size, dropping all that garbage in the header immediately dropped 2K off the top that weighed each page down.
Dropping meta tags isn't going to change much if you are only looking for and attempting those million a day words, but it will make your pages leaner and googlebot "especially" loves "non-fat products".
Be careful, outside the Flash page advice and Google/Fast etc.
There are a few directories that extract metatags for their listings.
There still exist local search engines which use the metatags for ranking and indexing purposes = Ilse.nl is one. (they have about 30% market share in the Netherlands).
But apart from that, almost useless for SEO and boosting rankings on the whole.
