Keywords

[wedmonds]

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! 

[Theo-NL]

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.

[seomagnet]

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.

[wedmonds]

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?

[MarieHaynes]

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.

[3Amigos]

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

[Bevelwise]

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.

[KeriMorgret]

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!