Very long article but well worth the read....
http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/april_2004.html
I would like to highlight a couple of points about the keyword tag discussion in the article:
Jon Glick elaborates on 3 features of the keyword tag in the next paragraphs:
1) He is emphatic that the keywords in the tag are of relevence only to matching enquiries not to any measure of page ranking.
2) Phrases should be seperated with commas.
3) Over long strings of words will raise a red flag
Quote:
Each keyword is an individual token separated by commas. So that's that. You want to separate these things with commas and not just put one long string of text. The more keywords that are put in and the more they're repeated, the much larger the chance our spam team is going to want to check out that page. It doesn't mean that page is going to get any specific judgement. But it is very much a red flag. For best practice you just need to remember it's for matching - not ranking. Repeating the same word 20 times is only going to raise a red flag... It doesn't increase your likelihood of showing up on any given set of search results. It's just a risk with no benefit.
o Mike:
So I could put, I don't know... er... for instance, ‘laptop computers, desktop computers, palm computers...’
o Jon:
Exactly, and, of course, since each of those is separated by commas, then ‘laptop computers’ will count for ‘laptop computers’ and not ‘laptop’ or ‘computers’ separately. So doing it like that means that you're not going to be penalised for keyword spamming on the word ‘computers’.
What does everyone think about how Google would handle such a comma seperated keyword tag? Would they ignore it completly or could it raise a red flag?
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