Keywords
-
Hi All,
If I had a site about a cartoon character (for example).
When I add keywords to the 'keywords' meta tag, would I be best to put specific phrases such as
Cartoon Character, Cartoon Character on TV, Cartoon Character on Television
or would the following have the same effect:
Cartoon Character, Tv, Movie, Television
I was wondering if having the above instance might be less effective as the search engines might read TV, Movie, Television as less relevant to Cartoon Character.
Hope that makes sense!
-
Hi Wayne,
Are you still looking for more information, or did the responses so far meet your needs? Let us know if you'd like more input, or mark this thread as answered. Thanks!
-
Yahoo use to be the only ones who really took this into account, but since last year when Bing started running the technical side of their engine as well this pretty much become insignificant across the board. Bing tries to be more and more like Google every day so I believe that taking time to use the tag (even though it may only take a measly minute or so) after you know the target keywords for your piece of content I still think the disadvantage of also showing your competitors what terms you are trying to rank for outweighs the hypothetical pro of thinking people still take this into account.
-
Hi,
Infact SEOmoz's Campaign Manager provides you with a critique of your web pages. If they use the meta keywords tags, it recommends that you take them out.
Regards,
Chris
-
If you do a search on SEOMoz for meta keywords you'll find that most SEOs don't put any time at all into meta keywords. In fact, there have been several posts where some SEOs have suggested going back in and removing meta keywords in order to clean up their code.
I don't use them at all. I do use a meta description though in case my page gets shared on facebook as FB uses the meta description.
-
I was aware that it did not count for much these days but it appears to me that 'every little counts' in terms of ranking etc. So its got to help in someway surely?
-
I could be wrong here but I don't really agree with Theo as (and you can test for yourself) that Bing and Yahoo will index you and will look at your meta keywords. Google will NOT and will ignore your keywords as Matt Cutts has indicated, having said that I will still put moderate keywords based on my overall site and page theme.
I have done a simple test by adding a misspelled keyword and within a week I did really well on both Yahoo and Bing and when I removed the keyword my rank has disappeared.
Now to answer your question in full I would put the following:
Cartoon Character, Cartoon Character on TV, Television Cartoon Character etc
Try not to put Cartoon Character at the beginning of the keyword put should have a variation.
-
The keywords meta tag is not being used by any of the major engines as a ranking signal.
Investing time into that is at first a waste of time, and secondly you are actually providing your competitors with valuable information about the keywords you're targeting. More on the subject in one of my presentations and on my blog.
[edit]
View the: official statement by Matt Cutts on this subject.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Are keyword focused pages actually hurting me?
Is the practice of having keyword focused pages a thing of the past? Here is what I am seeing. My biggest competitor ranks #1 or #2 in most of my relevant keyword phrases (about 20 that I consider most important). They DO NOT have keyword focused pages. They have a PA of 42.5 and a DA of 33.8. They have 72 root domains that link to them. Their home page is fairly lite for content. Only 1 paragraph of text really... and a few reviews local to their page (not TA or anything). Socially, we we have the same FB following... but I also have blog, G+, twitter, pinterest, flickr, instagram, youtube, and linkedin. My keyword pages will rank #8 or #9. My home page hardly ever ranks. My home page has a PA of 40.3 and a DA of 29.1. I have 60 root domains that link to me. BUT... my keyword pages fall much lower. For instance, one has a PA of 16.1 and only 1 root domain link. So, my question is... are my keyword pages actually hurting me? Meaning... is google seeing my keyword page as more relevant content wise (because they are perfect for keyword placement, % of keyword to text, etc), but they rank them lower because of PA and back-links? Should I take down my keyword focused pages (one at a time maybe???) and work on building my home page?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20001 -
Keyword in URL vs organization
I have a jobs site that currently has the following structure for jobs: www.site.com/jobs/openings/1234.html Categories used to be listed this way: www.site.com/jobs/openings/accounting But we changed it to: www.site.com/jobs/category/accounting Does it matter? Is one better than the other? The page title, heading, and description also have the word "openings" or "opening" in them.
Technical SEO | | cmp1010 -
Trying to Optimize my site for one keyword any advice please
Hi, we are trying to optimize our site www.in2town.co.uk for the keyword of lifestyle magazine. We are having trouble with this. We were last year number one in google for the keyword and then the end of last year we went to position four and now we are on the bottom of the second page and we are not sure what is happening. here is the text view of the site http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5U281SBmDlUJ:www.in2town.co.uk/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=uk&strip=1 I am just wondering if we need to do a better description of the lifestyle magazine at the top as i know it says you should have your keyword within the first 100 words Any help on trying to solve this problem and get the page back where it belongs will be great. I know we have a lot of text on the page so google maybe finding it hard to find out what keywords are what but the only keyword we are interested in this page is lifestyle magazine, in the near future we would be looking at including lifestyle news many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
New small business.. brand or keyword rich domain?
With so many keyword rich domains in circulation is there actually little option for small business right now other than to use keyword rich domains themselves e.g. (businessname)(keywords).com instead of brand e.g. (businessname.com) where competitors are using keyword rich domains and ranking high? It could be a mis-perception on my part, but, unless you have a very old non keyword domain name, if you don't have a keyword rich domain name in a competitive market you will struggle to succeed unless you have a serious SEO budget. Unless you are the next Google/Facebook/Pepsi isn't branding just a load of BS ? We are ourselves are in a predicament about which domain to use for our own website design business. We have a brand name domain name which is a 4 char domain but we also have a brand+keyword domain and are not 100% which one to use as our primary domain. Perhaps we can use the brand domain as our primary domain and then use the brand+keyword domain as an appropriately constructed single page promotional site, perhaps with unique content which links back to the brand domain? Good idea / Bad idea? I guess the overriding question is, if the content is good enough is the domain name you choose irrelevent to some extent?
Technical SEO | | NeilD0 -
Domain stuck at end of SERPs for main keywords
I'm trying to figure out why a site has been stuck at the end of the SERPs for almost a year. On August 5, 2011 the site went from getting 1,400 visits per day from Google down to 20 visits a day from Google. For the keywords it ranked on the first page for it went to the last page in the SERPs. With Panda and Penguin, it probably wouldn't rank like it used to, but it seems to be stuck in some sort of domain wide penalty that pins it to the end of the SERPs. Even when completely new content will show up at the end of the SERPs, which makes me think it's stuck in some sort of filter. Thanks in advance for any constructive ideas. The site can be reached at: http://ta.gg/5m2
Technical SEO | | poolhall0 -
Local Keywords Not Ranking Well in a Geographic Location (but Rank Very Well Outside of Geographic Location)
Has anyone experienced, in the last few months, an issue where a website that once ranked well for 'local' terms in Google stopped ranking well for those terms (but saw a ranking decrease only within the geographic location contained within those keywords)? For example only, some 'root' keywords could be: Chicago dentist Chicago dentists dentist Chicago dentists Chicago What happens is that when a searcher searches from within the geographic area of Chicago, IL, the target website no longer ranks on the 1st page for these types of keyword phrases, but they used to rank in the top 3 perhaps. However, if someone was to search for the same keyword phrases from another city outside of Chicago or set a custom location (such as Illinois or even Milwaukee, WI perhaps) in their Google search, the target website appears to have normal (high) 1st page rankings for these types of terms. My own theory: At first I thought it was a Penguin related issue but the client's rankings overall haven't appeared to have been affected on the date(s) of Penguin updates. Authority Labs and Raven Tools (which uses Authority Labs data) did not detect any ranking decrease and still reports all the local keyword rankings as high on the 1st page of Google. However, when the client themselves goes to check their own rankings (as they are within that affected geographic area), they are no where to be found on the 1st page. :S After some digging I found that (one of) the company's Google Places listings (the main office listing) became an 'unsupported' status in Google Maps. So now I am thinking that this phenomenon is due to the fact that other listings are now appearing in search results for the same location. For example, in this case, an individual dentist's Google Places listing (who works within the dental office) is being displayed instead of the actual dental office's listing. Also, the dentist's name on the Google Places listing is being swapped out by Google with the name of the dental office, but if you click through to the Google Places listing, it shows the name of the individual Dentist. Anyone encounter a similar issue or have any other theories besides the Google Places issue?
Technical SEO | | OrionGroup0 -
How can I use a keyword based domain to rank for my existing site?
Hi everyone, From my understanding if your keywords are in your domain name it can help you rank for the keyword. My site www.pixelchefs.com was affected from the latest Google Algorithm changes, as I used my main site as a testing ground for all my back linking. Our site was a single page with Jquery slide, late February the same time with the Google algo changes we uploaded our new site, larger site with lots of pages and info. Result of that was that home page has PR3 and all other pages PR0. Well I don't really depend on Google for any work as most of my work comes from referrals.......but While searching for names for my private page I came across the domain name www.DesignOrlando.com, The specific keyword gets 22,210 view per month according to Google analytics and also contains part of the keyword for all the keywords I am after. I want to use the domain name for my main site but i am not sure what is the best way to forward the domain so Google can start reading my site as DesignOrlando.com Any Suggestions will be very appreciated.
Technical SEO | | alex_pixelchefs0 -
Website completely dropped off Google in our top keywords
Over the weekend, our website (http://www.esdandassociates.com) completely dropped off the google database in our top keywords. The only way that our site can be found is if you specifically type in the company name. Other search engines were unaffected and rankings remained the same or rose for the week. Previous keywords that we ranked in the first couple of positions (san antonio advertising agency, san antonio public relations) are now not in the top 50. We have not made any recent changes to our site besides basic content updates and all appears normal regarding crawler access. I have also not been able to find anything irregular in webmaster tools. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | eriksimpson0