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We all know they're only a small factor in the process of SEO - but what can actually "hurt" the way a spider reads your chosen keywords?
In the following examples, we'll use "Hockey Collectables" as our main theme.
Which, in your opinion would be the most effective keywords tag - and why?
1. <META name="keywords" content="hockey,hockey collectables,collectables">
2. <META name="keywords" content="hockey,collectables,hockey collectables">
3. <META name="keywords" content="hockey collectables,hockey">
4. <META name="keywords" content="hockey collectables,hockey,collectables">
5. <META name="keywords" content="hockey collectables,collectables,hockey">
I've always been partial to a single keyword / accompanying keyphrase combo - and I've been extremely successful using that technique (for single pages - fitted to that page's content).
How would YOU write it?
(Sans the numerous other keyphrases a good SEO would target like "sports memorabilia", etc.)
The responses I've receieved so far are surprisingly varied.
!?!
>How would I do it
I would get rid of the commas ;) There is a recent thread discussing this (about 2/3 weeks old).
If I need to use the word hockey more than once, I would space them out evenly across the tag, with hockey as definite beginning tag, and trying to make a "keyword phrase" therefater this word.
After that, mention hockey again and repeat step 1 , thats how I would do it :) oh, you might want to add hockey at the end of it too since the keywords tag is basically a defunct SEO tool ! (No doubt it still has its uses)
btw, the missing out the commas lark I suggested comes from that other thread. The general consensus in here is that by not using commas, it allows the tag to be read in numerous ways, ie keyword permuatations as opposed to a list of "words"
/oh, and id just have "hockey collectables", maybe a few variations of the word collectables too, perhaps only using the ones that appear in body text
(edited by: brotherhood_of_LAN at 8:04 pm (utc) on May 9, 2002)
Should your need for position be related to sales.
Although its great to receive millions of visitors looking for Saturday Night scores, barbie dolls clothes, stamps and any other "collectables" the target is wrong and so to would be their satisfaction.
Does more harm than good to long term business.
yeah for sure, I think the same. I remember ciml making a good point about them, they basically spell out what keywords you are targetting, not good when considering the sort of people who would look at your keywords in notepad eh ;)
I, personally, would opt for:
<META name="keywords" content="hockey collectables">
:)
When it comes down to the essence of it --- I don't really think that including the keywords tag, or not including it, matters even the slightest bit these days, but if you *do* decide to include it; go for a couple of two/three word phrases that fit the content of that particular page and separate them by commas (with no spaces afterwards).
Either way - researching keywords/phrases should take more time than writing the keywords tag.
Better to focus on the content of your site and what's being delivered to the user once they click on your listing - IMHO, it doesn't matter that you're even #1 on Yahoo! if your site offers nothing of substance, in fact a click-back can even hurt your ranking in some cases.
STEVE
Alta Vista is case sensitive, and I think still considers keyword tags, and I think many smaller topic specific engines are also case sensitive.
For the small engines I believe it is because it is a much simpler algo. Also, I think the same applies to plurals.
Have you tested that recently? It's been a couple of years since I've seen any SERP on any major engine show different results based on case.
If i hear from enough sources that it is a bad thing then i will drop them in future builds.
Meta's are pretty dead, but their are a few crawlers that use them, don't forget the HTML comments
It is just what I have read. You may very well be right.
On a side note: I hate searching in AV, damn popups from the skyscraper ads are just unbelievable. The few searches I just performed opened up 4 new windows!
On the original topic though, of the choices offered, I'd choose #3.
While many above have made reference to the use of commas being problematic, in this particular case the comma causes no problems at all, since it makes no difference to engines that use commas, and those that don't in this specific case.
Spiders that see commas as separating search terms entirely (you don't get phrase matching on words separated by commas) still have 'hockey collectables' before the first comma. Since those are the only two words in your keywords tag, that's fine.
Spiders that simply use commas as spacing, or ignore commas will simply see 'hockey collectables hockey' as your tag content. No great problem to have a single repetition separated by only one other word.
In both cases, the #3 example is right for searches for 'hockey' and for 'hockey collectables'. It would suffer slightly on searches for 'collectables for hockey' on search engines that did use commas to separate phrases though, and if that were an issue, you'd perhaps be better off to remove the comma entirely.
As a general rule, it is safer to NOT use commas if you are at all unsure.
Ammon Johns
On google, which is primarily the engine I am most picky about, I removed the commas from the tags and lost a #1 position for all of our keywords. We also lost went from PR4 to PR5.
The only other changed made to the page was to pretty up the description tag for INK. That's it.
So I think we need to discuss this "COMMA" theory some more.
All rankings risen apart from the home page, though I have done some tweaking to that page and I feel its justified that I lost rankings on the page. Its a very general keyword so it would be much harder to maintain top rankings
So really, I think removing the commas, as far is google is concerned done pretty much nothing. Though thats just my experience of it.
But luck be with the Irish (I was I were right now) perhaps my fretting is all for not, we'll just have to wait and see.
Sparrow, I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Your SERP's went down and your PR went down from 5 to 4?
Sounds to me like you should check your incoming links - especially ODP.
No, don't think that's it but thanks for the suggestion.
Any other ideas?
[edited by: Axacta at 3:13 am (utc) on June 4, 2002]
9 times out of 10, there isn't any direct connection between your actions, and the following months SERPS. And I think this is one of those times. The idea that removing commas from your keyword tag is responsible for your drop just doesn't fit.
A huge chunk of the SEO community falls into the "no comma" camp. Google probably has hundreds of thousands of pages that contain keyword tags with no commas. If they all of a sudden backtracked on their position of ignoring the keyword tag, and then also included a penalty for not having commas, the resulting changes in their SERPS would be so dramatic, it would show up on the evening news.
