Words and Phrases

How Much Redundancy is Helpful? Harmful?

[peterinwa]

I looked through keyword postings till I tired. Sorry if I missed the one with my answer.

I've never been able to find anything clarifying the pros and cons of entering many variations of phrases. Does it really help with searches? Can you be penalized for too many? If you have too many will the latter be ignored?

My site's #2 in Google and #1 in Yahoo! searching for "calories." But I'm way down the list in other engines so I'm still wanting to improve.

calorie
calories
burn
burned
burning
calculator
calculators

It is a given that I would want the above for my Calories Burned Calculator. But where do I stop with the phrases?

calories burned
calorie calculator
calories calculator
calorie burn calculator
calories burned calculator
and on and on.

It would sure be simpler if only keywords mattered. Any advice or a point in the direction of a tutorial or older posting would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Peter

[WebGuerrilla]

It would sure be simpler if only keywords mattered. Any advice or a point in the direction of a tutorial or older posting would be much appreciated.

There was a time when meta keywords were all that mattered. Looking back, I guess you could say that it was easier, but coming from a search engine user's perspective, it certainly wasn't better.

The unfortunate answer to your question is that it really doesn't matter much what you do or do not put in your keyword meta tags. There simply are no longer any significant search engines using meta data to rank web pages.

We've had many past discussions on meta keywords. You should be able to find several using the site search (upper left corner).

Here are a couple of recent discussions worth reading.

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[fathom]

I've never been able to find anything clarifying the pros and cons of entering many variations of phrases. Does it really help with searches? Can you be penalized for too many? If you have too many will the latter be ignored?

Yes and No

My site's #2 in Google and #1 in Yahoo! searching for "calories." But I'm way down the list in other engines so I'm still wanting to improve.

calorie
calories
burn
burned
burning
calculator
calculators.

This singular word list is kind of irrelevant.

calculator or (s) can be anything from currency to weight watching and although it is possible to capture visitors looking for what you have their will be alot of needed work get even close to the top of most people's search depth.

If you're ranked good with "calories." and traffic is coming in on this term it would be advantageous to accommodate as many variations (uses) for this term for short term success.

Like a directories you could be an authority on "all" uses of "calories." Try pyramiding your second list of terms (two word phrases) off of the primary page using these terms as the anchor text to the links.

It would sure be simpler if only keywords mattered. Any advice or a point in the direction of a tutorial

Excellent idea if you incorporate the above structure "like a directory".3

Edited to fix formatting problem.
WG
3

[edited by: WebGuerrilla at 11:13 pm (utc) on June 4, 2002]

[fathom]

I think there's a bug here.

What happen to my post!

[fathom]

Thanks WG couldn't fathom why!

[brotherhood of LAN]

From what I've experienced, themes seem to be the answer on the horizon.

You may have "green widget" on one page, and "green widgets", "greenest widgets", "greener widgets" etc on other pages......and the rather intelligent spiders will know, you are definetely talking about green (ish) widgets :)

Thats what I have experienced so far, maybe themes will be the answer.....seems much more clever than "meta keywords"!

However, I realise that the scope of this all is more than the keywords tag.....so maybe themes is worth dragging up here as a solution to a non-problem (in the near future) :)

[peterinwa]

WebGuerrilla, Thanks, those discussions were good. I had searched but didn't find them. I read many others.

I agree with the comment about the importance of the <title> tag. I think having my "keywords" in my title has helped significantly.

[peterinwa]

From your replies and earlier ones I have learned that keywords aren't very relevant anymore, and that if you have a "calories burned calculator" you wouldn't want to use the keyword "calculator" because you could get people looking for other types of calculators. Ignoring these points for a moment, I'd like to restate my original question more clearly.

If I have these 7 keywords:

calorie
calories
burn
burned
burning
calculator
calculators

Does it help to also have them in phrases?

It was pointed out that if you only had one keyword phrase, "calories burned calculator," you would only get visitors looking for a "calories burned calculator." That would be great, but my site statistics show that people search for:

calorie burn
calories burn
calorie burned
calories burned
calorie burning
calories burning
calorie burn calculator
calories burn calculator
calorie burned calculator
calories burned calculator
calorie burning calculator
calories burning calculator
calorie burn calculators
calories burn calculators
calorie burned calculators
calories burned calculators
calorie burning calculators
calories burning calculators
burn calculator
burn calculator
burned calculator
burned calculator
burning calculator
burning calculator

Will someone searching for my site (with a search engine that pays attention to keywords) with any of these 24 combinations of my 7 keywords find my site just as well if I only use the 7 keywords without phrases?

Thanks, Peter