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SEO Meta Keyword Question.

by Brekat23
13 replies
  • SEO
    • |
When creating a micro-niche site/blog - how many keywords is the 'goldilocks zone' whereas - how many keywords should I target (long-term) within my meta keywords section of my blog? 5, 10, 15, 100?

Thanks!
#keyword #meta #question #seo
  • Profile picture of the author SEOpsychic
    don't bother with meta keywords now. they are useless.
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    • Profile picture of the author NastyBlast
      Originally Posted by SEOpsychic View Post

      don't bother with meta keywords now. they are useless.
      Absolutely!

      the only reason I think people deploy the keywords meta-tag right now is because of dumb mass Bing/Yahoo. or out of fear that they are missing out on something that has not been confirmed. However Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google does not use the keywords meta-tag.
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    • Profile picture of the author snakeyes
      Originally Posted by SEOpsychic View Post

      don't bother with meta keywords now. they are useless.
      yes ! 100% useless
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  • Profile picture of the author redlegrich
    There are still some engines that look at keywords. I use them to keep track of what the heck I am optimizing the page for. Otherwise, months later I can't remember.

    Remember, Google is not the only game in town, you can still pick up a conversion or so elsewhere if you cover all of your bases. As far as numbers 5-7 keywords or keyword phrases.
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  • Profile picture of the author Giftys
    I agree with Red 100%. I'm of the "leave no stone unturned" state of mind. There are many other search engines out there. If only 3 of them look at meta tags then I'm going to make sure that I go ahead and include meta tags on every page. In this very competitive game, you can not afford to leave anything out. Just one visitor could be a customer for life and bring you hundreds or thousands of dollars of business.
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  • Profile picture of the author PPC-Coach
    I still use them and in my experiments they matter for quality score on adwords.
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  • Profile picture of the author noble
    Not 100% useless! For Google sure its not going to get you anywhere but for that 5% market share that gets tricked into changing their default search or putting on FF addons that are bundled with some weird search engine toolbar they may still be counted. No reason not to spend the extra 3 minutes to add them when creating a site.

    As PPC coach mentioned they are also useful if you are planning on running an adwords campaign. Your QS is crucial is you want to do adwords the right way and maximize your profits.
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  • Profile picture of the author danlew
    Its better if you can add keywords, between Yahoo and Bing there is still some good search traffic that you can get especially if your competitors are not adding keywords you will get top position in those quite quickly, never put all your eggs in one basket
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    http://virtualhelper247.com
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  • Profile picture of the author alastairevans
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
      Banned
      Originally Posted by alastairevans View Post

      Meta's are useless and also if you put your money keywords in there, people looking for niche ideas can pick them up and run with them. Don't give fuel to your competition.
      Like they can't figure out what your keywords are, without a meta tag.
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    • Profile picture of the author Brennan Mack
      The Title Attribute is not technically meta information, but is still very useful to all the major search engines, including Google. Most search engines only read about the first 70 characters of the title attribute though, so keep all pertinent keywords in that range.

      The description meta tag isn't very useful, but Google still takes it into account, even if only a little bit. For example, when you search in Google, it pulls the description as the text underneath the link, and bolds the keywords you searched for. Add to that, Google still provides support (via webmaster tools) to include the description meta tag. Most search engines only take into account about the first 155 characters of the description, so keep that in mind.

      Now to actually answer the OP. The keyword meta tag is not the MOST useless meta tag, but it's not used by Google very much. Still, just like the description, Google offers support for keywords, so be sure to include them. It's not about "how many" keywords, because I doubt ANY of the search engines read individual keywords to count them. The search engines are looking at how many characters are in the keyword section, if they're looking at anything. I'm not sure the exact number, but it's probably close to the description cutoff, at about 155 characters, maybe a little more.

      I'm still of the "leave no stone left unturned" philosophy of redlegrich and Giftys. You really don't have anything to lose. Plus, why discount Yahoo! and Bing? Just because SEOs are so obsessed with google doesn't mean the average consumer is. Plenty of them still use the other two.
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    • Profile picture of the author Brennan Mack
      Originally Posted by alastairevans View Post

      Meta's are useless and also if you put your money keywords in there, people looking for niche ideas can pick them up and run with them. Don't give fuel to your competition.
      I agree with yukon. If your competitors are paying attention to your meta keywords just so they know what to try to rank, they're not very threatening as competitors.
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  • Profile picture of the author JustaWizard
    I'm in the camp that says use the meta keywords tag - just mirror your title tag, it's that simple, does not take much time, and some verticals are indeed going to read those tags and it only takes seconds to mirror your title tags for that content.

    Hope that helps!
    David
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  • Profile picture of the author jolinepenniman
    wow, this is what i have read before but for me, my meta kw does help my site rank when doing backlinks anchor with it
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