In memory of keywords: what the keywords meta tag is for, why it doesn’t work and why it was buried. Meta tags title, description and keywords hinder promotion

I have a PHP/mySQL search function that uses one or more keywords in the value $keywords_search . The problem is that it matches ANY keywords, meaning if a search is done it returns results that eit

PHP MYSQL search engine using keywords

I am trying to implement search engine based on keywords search. Can anyone tell me which is the best (fastest) algorithm to implement a search for key words? What I need is: My keywords: search, fast

Searching using multiple keywords in PHP/MySql

I’m trying to search for people based on their skills by using different keywords. However, whenever I try to search, the results are narrowed down to match the exact keywords. Example: table for user

Answers

and and or have higher lower precedence than && and ||. To be more exact && and || have higher precedence than assignment operator (=) while and and or have lower.

Usually it doesn’t make a difference, but there are cases when not knowing about this difference can cause some unexpected behavior. See examples here:

Yes, they are the logically the same. (I believe “&&” and “||” are the preferred choice in the Zend coding standards, but can’t find any specific information on this, so it might all have been a dream. Or something.)

Of course, everyone who has at least some idea of ​​search engine promotion knows about the meaning of meta tags. Everyone is aware of the importance of title, description, h1-h6, alt and other tags. No one denies that they affect website optimization. But search engines have an ambivalent attitude towards one of the tags - the keywords tag.

In recent years, there has been a heated debate on the Internet that continues to this day: is it worth using the keywords meta tag at all? Unfortunately, no one can still give an exact answer. Let's consider different points of view and try to understand this issue.

What are keywords?

Keywords are keywords (no more than 20 for one page of the site) corresponding to the content of the page.

In the page code this meta tag looks like this:

Initially, the tag had a significant impact on the relevance of the site’s pages, and consequently on the site’s ranking in the top positions of search engines.

Knowing this, the site owners began to cheat - abuse keywords or add a large number of inappropriate words to this tag. And the search engines discovered this quite quickly.

What is happening now?

As they say, from one extreme to another: as a result, search engines stopped attaching any meaning to this tag at all.

Yandex

Yandex representatives stated the following about keywords: “...may be taken into account when determining whether a page is relevant to search queries”.

Please note that the keyword here is Maybe. After all Maybe doesn't mean at all taken into account.

Google

The system leaves no doubts and gives no grounds for thought. Everything is concise and clear here: “We don’t use keywords meta-tag in a search-ranking”, “Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy”.

“We do not use the keywords meta tag in search rankings”, “Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for many years, and there is currently no need to change this policy”.

Rambler, Yahoo, Mail.ru

They share the opinion of Google and believe that the keywords meta tag has exhausted its usefulness. Therefore, it is not taken into account by these search engines at all.

But why do many people still use keywords?

Most likely, this is due to Yandex’s ambiguous wording about the tag. The logic of site owners is this: if there is hope that Yandex will take the tag into account, and Google, Rambler, Yahoo and Mail.ru are neutral about the meta tag, then filling it out will not make things worse.

What if it does?

There is an opinion among optimizers that filling in the keywords tag can be harmful. If search engines do not consider a tag as a tag, then the text included in it is read as regular site text. And if you have already used these keys in other tags and in the body of the text, then there is a risk of “overspamming” the page with keys. Well, overspam (excessive nausea) can get you under the filter.

1PS point of view

So far we have described the general situation and the different opinions on the issue. Everyone has their own point of view. Our point is that it is better not to fill in the keywords tag. There is definitely no benefit from it, but there is still a risk of falling under the filter.

It’s better to promote your website with the right content and tags ...

Actually, you will need to know the syntax for creating a description, title and keywords mainly only for the formal purpose (well, or if you are creating a static site on Html files).

If you create a project on the (site engine), then you will be given the opportunity to simply fill out the form fields, after which this content will be inserted into the title, description or keywords in the web page code. But this is not the point, because we are not talking about details (more on them below in the text), but about global things - why these innocent things can be a killer factor for website promotion.

So, initially these meta tags were supposed to serve a good purpose - make life easier for search engines to identify the pages that are most relevant to the search query. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If an idyll existed for some time, it was only until competition for the Top search results appeared (traffic comes mainly only from the first page of search engine results for any), and the very presence of a resource in the Top did not directly affect the benefits received its owner.

Widespread spamming of description and keywords meta tags began, and the title also suffered. When ranking, search engines were no longer able to rely on factors that could easily be cheated, and gradually the meaning of the words included in the description and keywords was completely leveled(perhaps not to zero, but very close to it).

For some reason, search engines did not dare to act so harshly with the title. The words contained within this miracle tag are still of paramount importance in ranking, but relatively recently even this tenet of promotion (which lasted about fifteen years) has become less unshakable.

Description and keywords - meta tags that do not affect rankings

So, let's make an interim summary. Can Keywords be thrown in the trash? Well... Probably not. Personally, I try (if I remember) to write down the keys in it, but only those that are most often found in the article. The fact is that they have almost completely ceased to have a positive influence on promotion. But Keywords is still capable of shitting all the raspberries. Search engines have not yet abolished the punishment for spam in meta tags.

What's the description? Everything is not clear here. Why? Again, spamming keys in it can negatively affect your promotion. Why is it needed then, if the keywords are contained in it? are not taken into account when ranking, but can cause harm at the same time?

The fact is that the contents of the description by the Google search engine can quite often be used as a resource, especially at first. So, for example, my recent article about in Google search results for the query “translit” looks like this:

This is not the entire text from the description, because Google and Yandex only take into account a certain number of characters (you can count it yourself, but usually they focus on 150 characters including spaces):

I said that the snippet is most often generated by Google in this way, but Yandex sometimes also does not neglect this opportunity. All for the same request “translit”, the snippet in its output again so far consists of the words contained in the description of this web page:

As you can see, in the resulting snippet from both search engines, the query keywords (which I also used when writing the description) were highlighted in bold, which somewhat increases the chances of a transition to my site, because attracts additional attention to the ad.

This is the main purpose of description for website promotion - the snippet created by a search engine based on it should attract the attention of users and encourage them to choose your resource to go to.

Whether or not the description you wrote will ultimately be used as a snippet is a different question. Your job is to write it down with the obligatory mention of keywords, as well as intriguing and exploiting curiosity content users (within 150 letters).

However, this meta tag is only one of many ways to tell search engines what kind of text they should use as a snippet. Moreover, this method is not the most reliable and does not give any guarantees, but it is simple and straightforward - you just need to get used to always filling out the description fields before publishing an article.

It is clear that if you are in the Top for the request “plastic windows”, you will use the entire arsenal of ways to influence the snippet (for example, this one), because this can result in simply fantastic amounts of profit due to the increased CTR of your ad (coupled with title). But I personally am content with only the mandatory filling out of description, and also keywords (a bunch of them, but now I’ve already given up the latter, because that’s okay).

Title decides who will be in the Top and who...

What is the main difference between Title and Description? If you overspam keywords in all three meta tags, you can seriously pay by losing positions in search engines. This unites them and makes them a rather dangerous tool in the wrong hands.

But the Title (page title) has one difference. If you don’t write the other two meta tags, then nothing terrible will happen, but if you forget to write a title for a web page, then most likely it will will not participate in the search, i.e. will not be added to index().

Another thing is that almost all CMS automatically generate a title from the title of your article, and the ability to manually change it is usually provided optionally (for example, using appropriate extensions). Therefore, only owners should take care of its mandatory registration.

But the mere presence of a completed header on absolutely all pages of your site does not make a difference. There are a number of nuances that must be observed automatically when composing texts for titles and which can greatly affect both positively and negatively.

Moreover, it should be noted that this tag performs two very important roles:

It is precisely from taking into account these two concepts that one should proceed when composing the optimal text of the title. This could be the end of the conversation about him, but not everything is so simple. Let's try to chew all this in detail and pay special attention to those mistakes that can lead to fatal consequences.

Let's start with the impact of the title tag on ranking (from the webmaster's point of view, on promotion):

1. As I already mentioned, the main condition for successful promotion should be the presence of headings for all web pages of your site. No title - no search traffic.

The second important condition is that this tag is used in the web page code only once and only inside the Head container (and not Body). In general, the CMS (content management system) you use should be responsible for this, but it doesn’t hurt to check that it’s working correctly. To do this, just look at the source code of any page on your site and make sure that the title tag is present and correctly inserted into this very code.

You can view the source code of a site page by right-clicking in your browser and selecting the context menu item “Source Code” (in Opera), or “Page Source Code” (in Firefox), or “View Page Code” (in Google Chrome) , or View HTML Code (IE).

2. Headings for all pages of your site should be different from each other (be unique). It is quite difficult to achieve this in practice (for example, my main page has pagination and these same numbered subpages cannot boast of unique titles), however, for those pages that you promote, this rule must be followed. A large number of pages with the same title tell search engines that this site is similar to GS.
3. The order of keywords inside the title tag is also taken into account by search engines (mainly Google), so it is important to place the most frequent keywords at the beginning (he will tell you about this), and then in descending order of frequency. Implementing this task in practice is not so easy, because the page title must remain readable and, if possible, attractive.

Some CMS (for example, Joomla 1.5) by default form the page title from the site name that comes first, and only then add the title of the article. Following the logic of the previous paragraph, you cannot do this, because you will worsen the ranking (promotion) of your resource (you can find links to materials in the article about). Although a well-known SEO expert refutes this principle with his example:



An exception to this rule may be made for well-known brands, the mere mention of which may be an incentive to click on an ad (for example,).

4. Recently, Yandex and Google have become sometimes don't use title as a site title in search results. Most likely this is a response to the fact that this tag does not reflect or does not fully reflect the content of the article. From here we conclude that the words you display in it must be completely relevant to the text of the web page, otherwise the search engine will distort everything to its own taste and color.

Most experts advise limiting title length a certain number of characters (about 70), but personally I don’t always adhere to this rule, because I can’t create short headings. In principle, Yandex can select fragments with keywords from this tag of any length, which allows you to optimize the article for a larger number of queries. It won’t look like ice, but it’s quite acceptable, in my opinion:



True, Google, unfortunately, does not know how to do this and the user may not see the keywords from his request at all in the title of the ad for my blog:




5. There is one more point that I personally do not implement when compiling titles for my blog. By default, in many CMSs it is formed from the text of the article title, which will most often be enclosed in . Because the presence of keys in H1 is a ranking factor in itself (although not as powerful as the title), then it makes sense to write the title of the entire page slightly different from the title of the article. I personally don’t do this (it breaks), and in my H2 tags they live, not in H1.

   In WordPress, they usually use . to write unique titles, but in Joomla, as described in the article about .

6. In general, it is very important not to overdo it. On the one hand, brevity is the sister of talent, but simply listing keys in a title can lead to dire consequences (lower rankings or even the page being completely removed from the index). On the other hand, in order to reduce its size, it is advisable to use less empty (stop) words (conjunctions, particles, pronouns), which cannot in any way affect the ranking. All in all, we need to look for a middle ground.

How to write a title that exploits curiosity

A little higher, we looked at the technical aspects that primarily affect the successful ranking of your documents (their promotion). But so far we have only talked very superficially about the second task that Title performs. I'm talking about creating a catchy headline that can very significantly increase the frequency of clicks on your ad in Yandex or Google search results (ctr).

It won’t be very easy to implement all the tips described below in practice (I can’t do it), but if it works out, then this may eventually happen. The idea is to make the page title (title) not only meet all the requirements described above, but also be able to arouse curiosity in the majority of users who read it.

So, let's look at the basic principles of creating headlines that can awaken one of the most powerful driving forces of cognition - curiosity. In order to satisfy his interest, the user will be able to read your article from cover to cover, the main thing will be to maintain the interest throughout the entire article and not disappoint the user at the end (do not cross the line and do not stoop to).

What arouses users' curiosity the most are those titles (title, among others), the statements in which challenge established concepts. This will be especially effective for the reader who is familiar with this topic, but your title breaks the stereotypes he has formed and it begins to seem to him that he probably doesn’t know something (missed something, didn’t take into account, or there is some secret , which he does not know).

The desire to figure it all out flares up, and that’s what you needed. An example, probably, can to some extent be the title of this article (a test of the pen, so to speak).

So, in the way described above, you create some confusion (discord) in the reader’s head, thereby trying to stimulate him to read your article. But it's not that simple. Many readers will be on their own (people tend to evaluate their knowledge, as a rule, higher than it actually is).

They will assume that they already know what your article is about. You need to write the title so that they understand that you know what they know, but in the article you will talk about something still unknown to them.

Well, it would be nice if the text of the article corresponded to the title that was compiled with such difficulty. Each paragraph should maintain intrigue and curiosity, quietly answering the reader's questions.

In general, it is clear that the matter is dark. If you have talent, then using these tips you will be able to create a catchy title, but if you don’t, then you won’t (like me, for example).

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site

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