Meta Key Words

[gail]

In the process of changing to SPP and this of course entails losing all the meta keywords

I know the value of them is questionable on Google but I assume it won't do any harm to reinstall them.

The question i'm asking is if you have a lot of tea towels for instance on SSP is there any value in repeating keywords eg. Scottish, 100% linen, etc on every single teatowel or should you just concentrate on what makes that tea towel different from the rest?

Thanks

[Steve G Griggs]

Keywords metatag.

I really wouldn't put much effort into the Keywords metatag, as it's 99% redundant now. Inf act I cant think of a major search engine that uses them (if anyone knows different please correct me)
I would put the majority of my effort into good quality page names, page titles, page description metetags and keyword/phrase rich copy on the product pages, keywords in the picture filenames etc.

[Workwear]

Googling 'google meta keywords' brings up a link to the Google Webmaster Blog (fancy that):

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html


They basically say they don't use it as of around 3 years ago and I imagine other search engines have followed suite. I haven't included them since then to no perceivable detriment.
__________________

My site - Work clothes

[Steve G Griggs]

As a follow on I have a lot of pages without the Keywords metatag contents filled in and they still rank well in the Search Engines. Content is everything as far as SEO goes, just keep up with page title and descriptions as these are still used in search results.

[cheaptents]

Keywords are a funky little thing, ok Google and Bing don't use them, nor AOL. But some services do use them such as it's believe ciao and shopwiki use keywords for categorisation (not ranking).

From our point of view in house @ cheaptents.com we don't list them in our source code but we do have them in the system for each item we create. The reason is fairly simple.

1) keywords are used by a few services and you never know they may get used again one day for something, they do no harm for sure.
2) having a list of up to 3 keywords (not any more than this) on a page is useful for when you are starting to write the content for that page. When you write your product description if you've thought about the keywords of a product you will naturally lean towards them and so google will (hopefully) rank you for those.
3) not only can your product description be naturally geared up but also your meta description and image alt tags. (your title should hopefully be done automatically by this point!)

thoughts?

[Chunkford]

thoughts?

Meta keywords should just be used on the homepage for the reasons above. For the other pages it's a waste of time.

Of course this IMO

[Mike Hughes]

I agree. Keywords are largely irrelevant these days. I still put them in out of habit but the last search engine I can remember using them was Yahoo but that's all powered by microsoft/bing these days.

So use them of you want to but in reality I don't think it will make any difference to your rankings.

Mike