Meta Keywords

[damo2576]

Say I have a site that sells cleaning products/supplies.

 

Should my keywords be:

"cleaning products, cleaning supplies"

or

"cleaning, products, supplies"

 

Does anyone know how they work? Is each items between commas matched to search terms or does it seach across all meta keywords?

 

Does that make sense?!

 

Thanks,

 

Damo

[vasttech]

Depends on how you want the search engine to see your keywords. If you do one word, then the engine will look at each word individually. If you do two words, then someone would have to enter that exact phrase.

[Acheron]

damo,

 

I prefer that my keywords are seperated by word. So I changed the echo to:

 

<meta name="keywords" content="<?php echo str_replace(" ",",", $metakeywords_string); ?>">

[damo2576]

I've done a similar thing to my dynamic keywords. I also have some static one which are not separated by commas.

 

Thanks

[user99999999]

It should be comma seperated phrases.

 

"cleaning,cleaning products,cleaning supplies,order cleaning products"

 

products and supplies would be useless to have there alone.

[Acheron]

It should be comma seperated phrases.

 

"cleaning,cleaning products,cleaning supplies,order cleaning products"

 

products and supplies would be useless to have there alone.

Well, that really depends on the person searching and the search engine.

 

Just as an example (ignore the absurd fact in this case that only an idiot would search this one backwards):

 

Someone searching for "cleaning products" would find damo's site higher up in the rankings if he used keyphrases, as opposed to someone who used keywords

 

However, someone searching for "products cleaning" would find his results lower in the ranking, if at all if the search is phrase-based.

 

Using the words seperately may place him a little lower in the rankings, but it would assure that his site matched all searches.

 

I'm exhausted but I think that all came across ok.(?)

 

Ideally, using both is best but it starts to complicate the dynamic keywords/phrases issue.

[damo2576]

I can see I'm going to have to spend some more time thinking about my keywords....

 

Am I right in that Google doesnt pay too much attention too them? The good thing about my site is that its very text rich with good textual descrpitions so I think that will help with Google.

 

Looks like SEO is going to be a whole new project in itself.

 

Bring it on!

 

 

Damo

[burt]

I think that you are worrying about something that is not worth worrying about. Meta Tags are outdated, antiquated and almost useless.

 

What matters more is having good content and a good <title> tag. As well as a good domain name, and good links to your site from other reputable sites.

[damo2576]

I know you're right. I just want to make the most of every available method.

 

Your're right about title and content - I'm lucky that the products I'm working with have good descriptive textual descriptions.

 

Cheers,

 

Damo

 

ps. if you want to check it out and pass on any advices dev site is at dv1.chemaidedirect.co.uk

[Acheron]

I know you're right. I just want to make the most of every available method.

 

Your're right about title and content - I'm lucky that the products I'm working with have good descriptive textual descriptions.

 

Cheers,

 

Damo

 

ps. if you want to check it out and pass on any advices dev site is at dv1.chemaidedirect.co.uk

A few tips, not really suggestions. Kind of 'if you want them, they're there' ...

 

A few different ways of adding a title to the index (i.e. you could use the tep_function) but I did it this way:

 

Add anywhere in PHP tags up top:

 

  $cat_title_query = tep_db_query("select categories_name from " . TABLE_CATEGORIES_DESCRIPTION  . " where categories_id = '" . (int)$current_category_id . "'");
 $cat_title = tep_db_fetch_array($cat_title_query);

 

Add this in the title tag:

 

<?php if ($cat_title['categories_name'] > '') {echo ' - ' . $cat_title['categories_name'];} ?>

 

---------------------

 

You could use this to remove non-alphanumeric characters from your dynamic keywords/titles if you'd like:

 

$newstring1 = preg_replace("/[^a-z 0-9]/i",'',$string)

 

or this to make all lower case if desired:

 

$newstring2 = strtolower(trim($string));

 

 

As for the Google comment, I believe I read that Google primarily uses description tags and actual site content.

[damo2576]

Great tips - thanks!

[damo2576]

Acheron - Implmented change, would mind taking a look seeing if it all looks sensible to you?

dv1.chemaidedirect.co.uk

Thanks!