How to put a professional Keywords Meta Tag

[afridy]

Hai. my website does not have a Keywords meta tag.
Please explain me how to put some keywords in to Keywords Meta tag in simple & professional way.

Pls give me the example code with two or three keywords

Agent. pls.

[tedster]

The keywords meta tag is barely used by any major search engines. If you use it, make sure that your keywords are related to the page itself rather than related to the domain as a whole. Here's some example HTML

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword phrase,another phrase,keyword2">

[angelsfan 06]

Hi there! Tedster is right, search engines did crawl this part of your website when indexing but is not as popular as it was a few years ago. Most sites do not add this anymore but is still a good seo practice.

If you are going to use meta keywords it would be wise to add your meta description as well relating to each individual web page on your website. Do not use the same meta description and meta keywords for every page in your website, the search engines will consider it spam and will penalize your website. You can use the same structure Tedster showed you for your keywords when adding in your description if you choose to add it.

<meta name="Description" content="My site sells...">

good luck and HAPPY RANKINGS!

[lmo4103]

Is there really any down side to not having a keyword meta tag at all?

And is it worse to have any keywords not related to the page itself in the meta tag than to have no keyword meta tag at all? And how much worse is it?

[jimbeetle]

And how much worse is it?

Impossible to quantity since only the folks at the SEs know for sure. If for some reason you can't have keywords relevant to each page in the tag, well, I guess I'd leave it out.

[lmo4103]

should I take it that if there is a word in the keywords meta tag that is not on the page itself, then ... you had better take the word out or drop the keyword tag ... or face possible problems?

[jimbeetle]

No, not really. But if it looks like the meta keywords tag is being stuffed to make the page relevant for something it isn't, well then yes.

About the only SE that admits to looking at the meta keyword tag to a certain extent is Yahoo. Guidance from one of Y's engineers was to include relevant keywords, possible alternate or misspellings, synonyms, expanded locations, etc., the catch always being that they are relevant to the page.

[lmo4103]

>> looks like the meta keywords tag is being stuffed <<

Only the SE knows whether it thinks this.

I can only guess.

Suppose that the following string is representative of offerings from the site as a whole, but only a few of the words occur on the current page.

blue widgets, white widgets, widgets for sale, widget catalog, professionally manufactured widgets of all kinds, the widget experts, musical widgets, widgets for brick layers, free shipping offer....

I would like to make the page the best that it can be, but if the keywords meta tag really makes absolutely no impact, then it wouldn't be necessary to invest time fussing with it. And it wouldn't be necessary to to spend time debating with Joe Marketer over whether the keywords tag is just the way he likes it, or the way I think it should be.

I am seeking guidance on this because some say keyword tag is thought to detract, yet not provide any benefit. Others say it makes no difference. My (brain's) spam filter might think the above keyword string looks ok, but the SE's might not. However, if it doesn't matter ...

So yes, no, maybe ...

Any second opinions?

[tedster]

Depending on the search engine, such a keyword tag is either

1) creating a very minor detriment to the page (because it inflates page size and download time and includes off-topic keywords) or
2) having no effect at all.

It's really not worth any blood, sweat and tears -- there are much more effective ways to spend your development time in a site.

The best practice is to make the meta keywords tag page specific. If that's a hassle, then just skip it altogether. However, site-wide identical meta keywords tags are so common that they can't be hurting anyone very much, but they sure don't help either.

This is no longer an HTML question -- that part is answered -- but it has become a Search Engine Marketing discussion -- so I am locking the thread.