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Advisable? Indifferent? Bad idea?
And, even more radically, I'm flirting with the idea of leaving out the meta description tag too... Relying on just page titles and content for my rankings.
Bad Idea? Am I asking to get my rankings tanked here? It probably wouldn't matter much with Google, but what about the others?
I admit, I'm lazy, and don't want to take the time to re-write all these tags for over 100 pages, one by one...
One of my problems is that we have 2-5 pages addressing different aspects of the same topics... all of these pages could reasonably use the same keywords, but I wouldn't want the SEs sniffing out the duplicate keywords tags and penalizing me (even if all pages had very unique content and description/title tags). Then again, I don't want to bore myself trying to come up with 10 or so sets of 5 unique keyword tags for each keyword set... does that make sense?
Is this something I should worry about, or can I safely cut & paste my keywords in cases like this?
Onya
Woz
Be careful not to repeat keywords, or at least, not too closely together, within a single tag.
Also, many SEOs massively overload their meta keywords - I recommend keeping it to a max of around 150 characters unless you a targeting a specific engine that you know wants more.
Same goes for the description, make it have 'click appeal' and be short enough not to get cropped by any of the major engines. The description is mainly of use to persuade the visitor that yours is the best answer to his query anyway. A really good description will get you more clicks than sites ranked just above you if you can't get a top slot.
I've had pretty good luck with using nearly identical metas across all pages on a smaller site, focused on one topic. It seems to reenforce the theme.
The descriptions may read, "Dave's Widgets - Home page" and "Dave's Widgets - Order Page," etc.
The KWs in the meta for each page must appear in the content on the page or they're considered spam on most SEs. I'd suggest cut, paste and edit... I'm lazy! I delete KWs that don't appear in the content and add others that do appear, just pick 'em out of the content, not strain my brain trying to "build a list." Another approach is to retain the identical KW list on all pages and add some of the KWs you lack in the content area, into alt tags on the page.
Here's where I always start tripping up... say I have a page about solar panels (which I do). Here's what I have for keywords:
<meta name="keywords" content="solar power, photovoltaic, solar panels, alternative energy, home power, solar electricity, photovoltaics, PV panels, solar power system, renewable energy">
Now, the word "solar" is repeated, as are "power" "energy" and "panels"... but they're all in separate key phrases. I don't want to just stick single words in the tag, like "solar, panel, energy, power, alternative, renewable", because besides "solar" they're all too general.
I know I'm not going to get banned for it, because my old metas look like that... but is using two word keyphrases with repeating single words within them asking for trouble, rankings wise?
You can replace the first "solar power" with the later "solar power system" for a start - exact matches just check that the words are together, other words are allowed to be before and after without causing any weakening or penalty.
"solar power sytem" contains an exact match for "solar power" and for "power system".
Although you may sacrifice exact matching you can also keep words close together though not quite consecutive and rank well for many more varieties of phrases:
"alternative solar power energy systems" contains non-exact but still powerful matching for "alternative energy" (only two words between), for "solar power systems" and for "solar energy" too. By making strings that contain multiple phrases by just skipping one or two words you'll do far better (on average) than narrowing your focus to just a few exact phrase matches.
If you find that exact phrase matching is needed for the more competitive phrases then you can always make a couple of additional pages for those phrases alone.
Edited by: Black_Knight
