This article will be especially interesting for beginner webmasters. They should not only be able to design pages of the site and fill them with materials, but also write down the necessary meta tags. Similar tags are also used by developers when promoting video clips on YouTube and other interested parties.
General concept
From a huge amount you can choose the main meta tags: Title, Description, Keywords. The first contains a heading, the second contains a description of the page, and the third contains the main keywords used to promote the site. From the above list, it becomes clear that the Keywords meta tag, in fact, is the semantic core of user queries. It combines all the most significant key phrases.
Role in website promotion and search engine optimization
To understand its meaning, you need to recall the distant 90s, when there was only one main factor in ranking web resources for all search robots. At that time, it was still not possible to translate into reality the amazing idea of Larry Page (one of the several founders of Google Corporation) to use Page rank to determine web pages that match the query entered by the reader in the search field.
Accordingly, the system simply analyzed the article for the presence of phrases specified by the user. Search robots controlled the density of keys in the text. The content of the tags was considered with great bias, in particular, attention was paid to such a page element as the Keywords tag.
Appearance story
Special tags (meta), which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, in 1989, allowed the author to provide information about the content, title and keywords of the article to the search engine. Moreover, the meta tag did not become Title, unlike Description and Keywords. They were registered in a special container Head, which did not display the information indicated in it in the blocks of the site. Initially, the Keywords meta tag was designed to facilitate the hard work of search engines to identify web pages matching a user's request. Now everything has changed.
Sad consequences: Keywords meta tag does not affect ranking
What should have been beneficial began to turn into harm. The existing harmony was soon destroyed by the sudden competition for top results (traffic came only from the first page of the search for any queries). The benefit of the site owner has become directly dependent on the availability of the resource in the top.
Unscrupulous website developers began to spam keywords in the field in which the Keywords tag should be specified. Search engines could not focus on such a parameter that could be easily wrapped up. Keywords (Keywords) completely lost their meaning. It should be taken into account that search engines have long resolved the existing problem. Company developers answered webmaster questions in an interview.
Google Inc. said in 2001 that when ranking sites, it will not take into account the words spelled out in this meta tag. Yandex did not give such an unambiguous answer to the events, emphasizing that the keys can be taken into account by the robot. Experts conducted an experiment. A nonexistent word was included in the page tag. He was able to find only the search engine Yahoo. From this we can conclude that other companies have already decided on their attitude to the tag. We can hope that someday the search engines will reconsider the decision, but they are not going to change the policy for the next ten years.
Intermediate conclusions
You can summarize. Should I include a Keywords meta tag? What will this give when promoting a project? Definitely, he ceased in any way to influence the promotion. The belief that filling all the page information fields is the key to successful promotion has long lost its meaning. Moreover, if the keywords are selected incorrectly, the Keywords tag can cause the owner’s site to fall under the filter. Search engines are still punishing spam for negligent developers. Therefore, only those phrases that are most often found in the text should be indicated.
Keywords meta tag: how to fill correctly
Actually, if a developer creates a website on a modern engine (CMS), then he does not need to go into details and understand this. It is enough to simply enter the necessary data in the proposed fields, and the system itself will insert them in the right place.
If the webmaster creates a statistical resource in the Html language or acquires initial knowledge about sites, then he needs to know the syntax of the Keywords tag.
Of no small importance is the exact number of characters enclosed in this meta tag. Most sources indicate a different number of letters, while emphasizing that the main thing is to choose the right keywords correctly, and then this problem will be of secondary importance. However, the experience of developers proves that not everything is as simple as we would like. Compliance with the exact occurrence of search queries in the articles on the page and their specific sequence require a considerable investment of time.
When calculating the number of characters, search engines take into account spaces entered in tags. Letters can be calculated using the usual Microsoft Word program (data are listed in the statistics) or convenient online services. The search results will include the most famous services. Still, it's worth returning to the topic. Next, you can see the basis of the tag.
Code Sample
It looks like this:
Example: <meta name = "keywords" content = "...">
In no case can you prescribe keys just through a space! Each word must be separated by a comma. A meta tag consists of only 200 characters. You can specify both ordinary words and phrases. They should be found on the page. Repetitions of words are permissible, but do not get carried away with them, just 2 identical nouns are enough. If the topic is too large, it is better to break the information into several articles. The resulting texts should be placed on different web pages. Then the wizard will have the opportunity to pick up a lot more keywords for each individual part of the article. At the same time, he will be able to achieve maximum coverage of the topic with search queries.
What else can a properly designed Keywords meta tag serve for? It helps to deal with external website optimization . For example, if a developer buys links that are offered by GoGetLinks and GetGoodLinks eternal link exchanges, then he may not waste time creating a specific anchor (link text) for the URL. When the meta tag is full, the wizard simply copies the text from there, avoiding the tedious job of recording new information.
Tag Writing Secrets
There are several tricks used by experienced craftsmen. Do not include more than 7 words or phrases in the tag. Quality has always exceeded quantity. Better use phrases than simple common words. If you specify low-frequency keywords, then you can advance on them in search results. The more specific the request, the greater the likelihood that the site will be visited by the target audience. You should not use unions, prepositions, interjections and particles in this tag. Perhaps the phrase will become clearer for the user, but keep in mind that he still will not see the fruit of such efforts. Therefore, in writing key queries it is better to focus not on readers, but on search engines.