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Phrases as keywords, good or bad idea?

2 or 3 words, separated

         

silverbytes

8:17 pm on Jul 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I wonder if using Phrases as keywords, is a good or bad idea?

instead: blue, widgets, small,

small blue widgets, widgets, medium widgets,

And about spelling should I use key, key1, key3,
or key,key1,key3, or is it the same thing?

deejay

9:59 am on Jul 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I'm assuming that you are referring specifically to the keywords META tag here.

In which case, sure, if I have specific phrases that I'm targetting, then I use those actual phrases in the tag. It does get you into a situation though where if you have, say, 6 variants of the phrase, then your tag is going to look spammy for 'widgets', eg:

...large blue widgets, large red widgets, medium blue widgets, medium purple widgets, etc...

In that case I use the three main phrases and sacrifice the rest of the phrases in favour of using a word in the keywords tag a maximum of three times, eg:

large blue widgets, red widgets, fuzzy widgets, green, grey, purple... etc...

As far as separators go, I actually don't bother to use commas in my tags anymore.. just a space between the words.

At the end of the day, however, I give very little attention to the meta keywords tag as it is ignored by so many major engines/dirs these days due to spamming. I still think it is worth having just in terms of getting a small advantage with those smaller engines and dirs that do use it... but it's about bottom of my development priority list.

Nick_W

10:01 am on Jul 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Personally, I've completely stopped even using the tag. As far as I'm concerned it has no worthwhile value and bringing the <body> tag higher into the html flow does...

Nick

deejay

10:53 am on Jul 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



*nods* yeah.. have to admit that my latest site doesn't actually have any at the moment (ie, bottom of development list)... and as I haven't written the content in this case I'd have to read it all to write the tags, which I can't be bothered with.

It is rainy day/hangover work at best.

Also, I forgot to note above.. I usually only bother with having about ten words or so as a maximum in the tag. Think in terms of using the tag to emphasis your real KEY words.

Interesting point on the body tag. Although I am careful about getting keywords high up within the body tags, I hadn't given much thought to the value of getting the whole body raised up in the code. I probably use a small enough <head> for it not to be an issue.. but something to keen in mind for sure.

ritualcoffee

12:48 pm on Jul 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Let's be careful when talking about throwing out the tag. We are assuming that the site he is referring to does not have an internal site search.