This article will be of particular interest to novice webmasters. They should not only be able to design the pages of the site and fill them with materials, but also prescribe the necessary meta tags. These tags are also used by developers to promote video clips on YouTube and other stakeholders.
General concept
From a huge number you can choose the main meta tags: Title, Description, Keywords. The first contains the title, the second contains the description of the page, and the third contains the main keywords for which the site is being promoted. From this list, it becomes clear that the keywords meta tag is, in fact, the semantic core of user queries. It combines all the most essential key phrases.
Role in website promotion and search engine optimization
To understand its meaning, you need to remember the distant 90s, when there was only one main ranking factor for web resources for all search robots. At that time, it was not yet 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 Internet pages corresponding tothe 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 passion, in particular, attention was paid to such a page element as the Keywords tag.
History of Appearance
Special tags (meta), which were invented by Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, in 1989, allowed the author to communicate information about the content, title and keywords of the article to the search engine. Moreover, Title did not become a meta tag, unlike Description and Keywords. They were written in a special Head container, which did not display the information specified in it in the site blocks. The keywords meta tag was originally designed to ease the hard work of search engines in identifying web pages that match a user's query. Now everything has changed.
Unfortunate Consequences: Keywords Meta Tag Doesn't Affect Ranking
What was supposed to be 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 site developers started spamming keywords in the field where the Keywords tag should be specified. It's easy to focus ona scalable parameter search engines could not. Keywords (Keywords) have completely lost their meaning. It is worth taking into account that the search engines have long solved the existing problem. Developer companies answered questions from webmasters in an interview.
Google stated in 2001 that it would not consider the words in this meta tag when ranking sites. The Yandex company did not give such an unequivocal answer to the events, emphasizing that the keys can be taken into account by the robot. An experiment was carried out by specialists. A non-existent word was included in the page tag. Only the Yahoo search engine could find it. From this we can conclude that the rest of the companies have already decided on their attitude to the tag. One 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 take stock. Should I use the keywords meta tag? What will it give when promoting the project? Definitely, he ceased to influence the promotion in any way. The belief that filling in all the fields of information about the page is the key to successful promotion has long lost its meaning. Moreover, with the wrong selection of keywords, the Keywords tag can cause the owner's site to fall under the filter. Search engines still punish negligent developers for spamming. Therefore, only those phrases that are most often found in the text should be indicated.
Meta tag Keywords: how to fill in correctly
Actually, if a developer creates a site on a modern engine (CMS), then he is not required to go into details and understand this. Simply enter the required data in the proposed fields, and the system will insert them in the right place.
If a 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 label.
The exact number of characters included in this meta tag is important. Most sources indicate a different number of letters, while emphasizing that the main thing is to choose the right keywords, and then this problem will take on 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 articles on the page and their specific sequence requires a lot of time.
When calculating the number of characters, search engines take into account the spaces included in the tags. Letters can be counted using the usual Microsoft Word program (the data is indicated in the statistics) or convenient online services. The search results will include the most famous services. Still, it is worth returning to the topic. Next, you can see the basis of the tag.
Coding Sample
It looks like this:
Example:
In no case should keys be written simply with a space! Every word must beseparated by a comma. The meta tag is only 200 characters long. You can specify both ordinary words and phrases. They should also appear on the page. Repetitions of words are acceptable, but you should not get carried away with them, 2 identical nouns are enough. If the topic is too large, then it is better to break the information into several articles. The resulting texts should be placed on different web pages. Then the master will have the opportunity to select 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 by search queries.
What else can a well-formed Keywords meta tag serve for? It helps to understand the external optimization of the site. For example, if a developer buys links offered by GoGetLinks and GetGoodLinks perpetual link exchanges, then he may not waste time creating a specific anchor (link text) for the URL. When the meta tag is filled in, the wizard simply copies the text from there, avoiding the tedious work of writing new information.
Secrets of writing a tag
There are several tricks that experienced craftsmen use. Do not include more than 7 words or phrases in the tag. Quality has always trumped quantity. It is better to use phrases than simple common words. If you specify low-frequency keywords, then you can move up in the search results for them. The more specific the request, the more likely it is that the site will be visited by the target audience. Do not use conjunctions, prepositions, interjections and particles inthis tag. Perhaps the phrase will become clearer to the user, but it should be noted that he still will not see the fruit of such efforts. Therefore, when writing key queries, it is better to focus not on readers, but on search engines.
