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Using the Meta Tags Dialog
[help.yahoo.com...]
Keywords:
Though the keywords tag isn't as important as it once was, effective keywords can still influence your search engine rankings.
and...
Getting Started Promoting Your Site
[help.yahoo.com...]
4. Add Keywords and Meta Tags
Although most search engines have deemphasized their significance, meta tags and keywords still represent an integral part of search engines' ranking formulas.
Now, how would you interpret the emphasized parts which are my doing?
Enter your keywords in order of importance, and be sure to use keywords that actually appear in your page content. Don't repeat keywords more than twice (and not consecutively!), and keep the list under 256 characters.
This all came up yesterday (2007-09-04) amongst peers when the question was asked...
"Finally, how important is the keyword meta tag?"
I typically use them out of habit and good practice. I've seen some state that the meta keywords element can do more harm than good as it exposes your targeted keywords. Come on now, back down here with the rest of us!
Is there any harm done in developing Effective META Keywords Elements? Are there any benefits? Is this such a basic topic that you're going to ignore it? ;)
From a Mike Grehan interview with Y!'s Jon Glick back in April 2004:
if you have a product which is frequently misspelled. If you're located in one community, but do business in several surrounding communities, having the names for those communities or those alternate spellings in your meta keywords tag means that your page is now a candidate to show up in that search. That doesn't say that it'll rank, but at least it's considered. Whereas, if those words never appear then it can't be considered.
So I could put, I don't know... er... for instance, ‘laptop computers, desktop computers, palm computers...Exactly, and, of course, since each of those is separated by commas, then ‘laptop computers’ will count for ‘laptop computers’ and not ‘laptop’ or ‘computers’ separately. So doing it like that means that you're not going to be penalised for keyword spamming on the word ‘computers’.
I'm in a different spot than most people here since for the last few years my sites have been 99% for "fun" so I have a somewhat different set of interests/concerns but...
It sort of bothers me when people say "there's no reason to use keywords because SEs ignore them" because it ignores two facts (or maybe these are "assertions")
1. Most META elements are not oriented toward SEs, but are not necessarily useless because of that. In that vein, I take the time to put keywords into a "meta_keyword" database field not for the SEs, but because someday I might want to use them for my own internal search, for some navigation (tagging) etc, and just feel like it's easier to put them in at the time that I'm building the page. Since they're there, I use them in a keyword tag. You can save that much bandwidth by eliminating newlines and tabs if that's your concern.
2. SEs may have dramatically devalued keywords because of spamming, but it is still potentially valid and useful meta information. I have no reason to assume that SEs won't decide that as they get better at discerning spam from quality (debatable, but that's another issue) and they will pay more attention to keywords that seem to fit with the overall page. I don't believe that my viagra page is going to rank because I stuff the keyword tag, but in the more general situation where the SE is trying to find the best fit for a long-tail search, the keywords tell the SE what the page author thinks the page is about. If those words appear on the page as well as other semantically related terms, it does not surprise me that the SEs use that information in some way.
Again, why not add them now? It's a small amount of bandwidth. Who knows how users will search in the future, what search engines will look at, and what information readers will want down the line. Perhaps if keywords come into fashion, used as intended, I can imagine browsers that would use them. Think, for example, of how useful it might be to someone surfing with a screenreader to have the reader say: "Page keywords: meta tags, key words, SEO" to describe this page before reading the entire page. For those people, it might be a proxy for skimming, for example.
IMHO, they've never been totally useless. The problem is, I have convinced myself through testing on our sites and in helping clients that there is clearly potential for causing problems. Examples of the kinds of problems are referenced in the OP.
Since many of my clients had it so wrong when I first say their sites, it was easier initially to have them remove problem KW META's completely (often a push of a button), rather than go in and fix thousands or millions of pages.
When practical, however, there is no question that clever use of the KW META is a plus, especially when thinking about contextual searches and the long tail.
If you have a product which is frequently misspelled. If you're located in one community, but do business in several surrounding communities, having the names for those communities or those alternate spellings in your meta keywords tag means that your page is now a candidate to show up in that search.
Ah, I have some issues with the above. I believe this is where the SEs went astray and the problems began for the META Keywords Element. I don't think it was meant to be an area to use words that are not listed on the page. Personally I would think that method of use would negate its effectiveness.
No, I'm going to be dropping my primary targeted keywords and phrases for that page right into that element. If its not on the page, it doesn't qualify.
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