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 "appliance repair" and "appliance repair los angeles" consider the same keyword?
Hello, I know that you can't optimize two pages for 1 keyword because Google will get confused and will rather prefer my competitor. But I can't get if it will consider "appliance repair" and "appliance repair los angeles" same keywords? The homepage of my website, https://www.ifixappliancesla.com, is optimized for "appliance repair", one of the inner pages is optimized for "appliance repair los angeles". None of them shows on the first page in local SERPs for any of those quires. I am wondering if this is because Google sees it as both pages are optimized for "appliance repair"?
Technical SEO | | VELV0 -
Fluctuation in Ranking for the keywords
We were ranking well for most of the keywords.These keywords were at first page i.e mostly @ 1st and 2nd position in Google.But we have put the following tag ie no index tag for our pages by mistake and after that the ranking fluctuated & fell down in Google search results as our pages were out of index in Google .We have removed the noindex tag after encountering the problem.Now I can see my pages are cached & indexed in Google after submitting to index in Google webmaster tool.Can I regain my ranking for the keywords and within how many days I would regain my previous ranking?
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Does Google think My main keyword is my Company name due to over use in anchor text?
OK, i have recently noticed google is adding a keyword to my titles... I have attached an image which shows the results from a google site:mywebsite search... 8 out of the 10 results on the screen shot clearly have the keyword ( - CCTV Cameras) added to the end of the title. Now a lot of those pages are support pages i.e "Help & Support", "returns" etc etc.. nothing really to do with cctv cameras. The only thing i can think of, is the most common anchor text used on backlinks to my website (according to siteexplorer) is the keyword cctv cameras... (i am currently working on removing a load of the backlinks to my site due to what i think is some kind of google penalty as the anchor text is all keywords etc...) But it seems strange if google has started to discount these backlinks, that it then uses that keyword to add to my titles - unless of course, google thinks that it is my brand name... Any body have any thoughts on this? FqwooQY.gif
Technical SEO | | isntworkdull1 -
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 -
Google doesn't rank the best page of our content for keywords. How to fix that?
Hello, We have a strange issue, which I think is due to legacy. Generally, we are a job board for students in France: http://jobetudiant.net (jobetudiant == studentjob in french) We rank quite well (2nd or 3rd) on "Job etudiant <city>", with the right page (the one that lists all job offers in that city). So this is great.</city> Now, for some reason, Google systematically puts another of our pages in front of that: the page that lists the jobs offers in the 'region' of that city. For example, check this page. the first link is a competitor, the 3rd is the "right" link (the job offers in annecy), but the 2nd link is the list of jobs in Haute Savoie (which is the 'departement'- equiv. to county) in which Annecy is... that's annoying. Is there a way to indicate Google that the 3rd page makes more sense for this search? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jgenesto0 -
Ranking product reviews with same keywords and similar
How you would approach keyword optimization for content that people are searching for, and has the same product name, but with the network name on the end, and it’s basically a different phone on each network – or in other cases, it’s almost an identical phone but may have very minor differences. For example, iPhone 4S- sprint vs. iPhone 4S - verizon vs. iPhone 4S at&t How you would attempt to rank for the search terms?
Technical SEO | | kcorten0 -
Use target keyword on several page titles or homepage only?
If I want my homepage to rank for a keyword (ie "red widgets"), does it support or dilute the homepage's rank if I use the keyword on other pages? I can see it working either way: The search engine looks at your site, sees that the target keyword is used throughout the site, and ranks the site higher as a result. Using the keyword on several pages makes it so none of them stand out, and ultimately it's harder to rank highly. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Kyle_M0