Meta Keywords

how best to format it

[robjones3]

1. Plural
If i sell widgets, should i specify "widget" and "widgets" in the keywords list?

2. Phrases
If i sell green, blue and yellow widgets shoud my keywords tag say "green,blue,yellow,widgets" or is it better to say "green widgets, blue widgets, yellow widgets"?

3. Spaces
does it matter if there is a space after the comma between each word/phrase?

any advice/suggestions would be appreciated

rob

[Essex_boy]

1: All the forms, singular and plural
2: Green widgets, Blue widgets, red widgets - Is the way to go
3: I format my meta tags like this: webmaster, world, is, the, greatest

[caveman]

Hey robjones3, welcome to WebmasterWorld!

META KEYWORDS are of no consequence anymore in Google, and little consequence in most of the other SE's. They were abused/spammed early on and the SE's essentially discount them significantly or completely.

If you do use them, some guidelines to consider, taken directly from a page on the Yahoo! Web site:

- "Enter your keywords in order of importance"
- "Be sure to use keywords that actually appear in your page content."
- "Don't repeat keywords more than twice (and not consecutively!)",
- "Separate your keywords with commas, and keep the list to under 256 characters."

[Essex_boy]

Yep well about 48% do not have them so you can take your inference from that. I always have them.

[caveman]

Essex_boy, FWIW, I have them on old sites still because they are well crafted and relevant to the page and therefore do some good, but not on new sites because I no longer believe they are worth even small amounts of time. In fact I often recommend to clients that they remove them completely because done badly they can do more harm than good, and it's not worth fixing them on sites of any substantial size if the KW Meta can be removed via a CMS change.

If a site owner has the time and ability to craft them by hand then great. In most cases though, it's probably not worth the time versus, say, creating more content or doing more marketing.

Some very talented SEO's I respect now argue it's no longer worth spending more than the minimum necessary time on Page Titles and Meta Descriptions, because of the value these people put on offsite marketing (the context being time and resource allocation). I'm not yet fully of that opinion because I believe if you get them right at the start it can pay great dividends, but I do get the argument. In some cases it may come down to what the site owner/marketer is really good at.

The site owner's resource allocation between:
- on-page/on-site SEO, versus
- content creation, versus
- off-site marketing
... is an old-as-the-Internet debate.

[Essex_boy]

Yeah I understadn what your saying, move your SEO off the net into the real world. Horses for courses.