Hi,
I have a question and this may not be the right forum for this question so I apologize in advance.
My hosting company takes what I consider to be a keyphrase that people search and turns it into individual keywords. For example they take the keyphrase "flower girl dresses" I put in the keywords field and turn it into "flower, girl, dresses" They say that if they didn’t do it that way the site would actually be penalized on keywords.
I’m concerned about it because I’m not sure how the search engines search when someone types in a phrase. I’ve seen the metatags in the source code for some other sites and the the words are together as a phrase.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Z4K
They are talking about keyword density, but your keyword of flower girl dresses is far better than a keyword of flower, girl and dresses! To compete on these terms would be insane, but to compete on ‘flower girl dresses’ would be much better.
Don’t forget about ‘discount flower girl dress’ and ‘cheap flower girl dresses’ as well.
Will Google penalize you for too many keywords on your page? I’d imagine so, but you would have to have an awful lot and no one knows what the number is.
My thinking is, Google Techs are going to figure out an algorithm for natural text, so, just write your content as you would without any search engines but do so with your keyword in mind and I’ll bet you’ll do better than most
Your best option is to use a phrase and not to break it down. Send me a url and I’ll be happy to take a look and give you more information.
Best regards,
Jim.
You are right on Loretta, Google is not going to penalize you for key phrases! To prove this, just look at some of the big sites around and you’ll see plenty of key phrases. If this was the case, I would have been penalized a long time ago.
They might penalize you for having keywords / phrases that are too many characters, such as a meta keyword tag that spans 10 lines, but for your average keyword length, nothing is going to happen.
In fact, Google looks at the keyword meta tag, but only at a glance. [by the way, no need for quotes around each keyword or keyphrase]. For webpages, keywords are not used at all for ranking. They may be used for a flash only site or for adsense ads (ad targeting), but not ranking. A long time ago, webmasters tried to stuff a ton of keywords on their page to give them a boost in ranking, but search engines have long since x’d that (most big ones that is).
In fact, look at most of the big sites, such as google, Microsoft, Adobe and you’ll see that they do not even have keywords.
I would not focus on the keywords too much and focus more on content. Content is King