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Website keyword <meta ... does this matter?
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709
¡Damned!
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
 
2008-09-19, 15:02

Does this little front-slash thingy at the end matter?:

<meta name="keywords" content="applenova,apple,mac,forums,discussion,... ,macbook,mac pro" />

Some sites have it, some don't, and I wondered if it mattered all that much. I know a little less less than fuck-all about these things and I wanted to add some keywords to a few pages on a friend's site.

TIA.

So it goes.
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jdcfsu
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Florida
 
2008-09-19, 15:10

I think it's a good idea to keep it with about 7-10 keywords for the search engines that still use that for their indexing. But most engines now use actual site content to generate keywords on their own so it doesn't matter too much. I have no source, but I know I've read it a few places.

90% of statistics can be made to say anything 50% of the time.
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709
¡Damned!
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
 
2008-09-19, 15:25

Fair enough. I just copied and pasted from Apple's source code, but then checked a few other sites and found that a lot of them have the front-slash. I might as well add it just to be safe. Thanks.

Out of curiosity, how long does it generally take for these things to get updated by the search engines?

Also, he has a list of about 20 keywords he wants to put in. Is that too many? Will it affect the search quality?

So it goes.
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curiousuburb
Antimatter Man
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: that interweb thing
 
2008-09-19, 15:31

It might be the Shiraz talking, but IIRC, use of the 'self-closing' / in code varies depending on the doctype declaration. Strict/X/D/Html of various versions tell the browser to expect particular tags. The pages you've seen that vary are (i'm guessing) not all specifying the same doctype.

As for meta=keywords, SEO specialists charge beaucoup bucks to get high pagerank, and although different engines index keywords-vs-page content differently (once upon a time spamming your page with invisible tiny text repeating keywords would bump your rank up... parsers now filter you out for this), a good list of 25 keywords is still worth including. More than 50 will probably get ignored by most engines, but culling is easier than generating.

Forcing your client to guess the top 25 search terms that would help find them, then comparing it to actual referrer logs (and updating the keyword list), is instructive, and helps build better sites.

All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand.
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jdcfsu
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Florida
 
2008-09-19, 15:47

I'm totally retarded. I didn't notice your first sentience at all! Just saw the keyword tag and everything below it.

But yeah, curiousuburb is right, it depends on the doctype you're using. The same goes for all self-closing tags <br />, etc. I use XHTML which requires the self closing deal but I believe HTML requires the entire tag. <meta ...></meta> or just <br>.

90% of statistics can be made to say anything 50% of the time.
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709
¡Damned!
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
 
2008-09-19, 16:11

Well, this is the first line I see when I view the source:

Code:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
So that means it's XHTML, right?

I don't know how you web jockeys put up with this mumbo-jumbo.

So it goes.
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jdcfsu
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Florida
 
2008-09-19, 17:50

Yeah, that's XHTML so here's what you need to know about the META tag: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_meta.asp
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curiousuburb
Antimatter Man
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: that interweb thing
 
2008-09-19, 18:15

Yarrrrrr, points for mildly inebriated geniushnesh... wheres the geniooush bar again?
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709
¡Damned!
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
 
2008-09-19, 18:19

Awesome. Thanks guys.
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