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LaurenEll
05-12-2014, 01:16 AM
I am trying to view the keywords used for this site. longbeachschoolofyoga .com

I right click --> view page source

I do not see keywords listed in the code. Does this mean the site does not have keywords or could they possibly be hidden?

LaurenEll
05-12-2014, 01:33 AM
In the page source info I see Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v1.4.7, so SEO plugin is in use, but there are no keywords? I'm assuming keywords have not been inserted.

Similarly... I cannot see keywords at the top of page source for this site either and they come up #1 in google search for multiple cities. desertwraps .com

vangogh
05-12-2014, 02:07 AM
What you were looking for is the meta keywords tag. It's useless. Search engines ignore it now. No one who knows what they're doing where seo is concerned uses them. You can try looking at the title of the page instead. The home page of the site in question is trying to target

Yoga Long Beach
Senior Yoga Long Beach
Yoga Teacher Training

The site in your second post is trying to spam search engines. They're using a paragraph for the page title. Search engine will read the whole thing, but ignore most of t as far as ranking is concerned. Figure the first 70 or 75 characters are used with the rest ignore. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the paragraph long page title doesn't sound some spam alarm in time.

There are hundreds of factors that go into where search engines rank different pages for different search queries. The meta keyword tag stopped being one about a long time ago. However, the links you added to point to those sites will probably help them rank ever so slightly better. Yoast's seo plugin doesn't insert keywords into the site's pages. It'll help you determine if the page you've written is targeting specific phrases, but it doesn't put the keyword on the page.

I assume your goal in all this is to help a clients of yours. Is that right?

By the way, I changed the links in your posts so they're no longer active, since I'm guessing you didn't want to help either of those sites.

LaurenEll
05-13-2014, 02:02 PM
Thank you ! It is nice to see the keywords in page source even if they don't serve much of a purpose. Seems it's better for the vendor that they're invisible though.

vangogh
05-13-2014, 04:59 PM
Keep in mind anyone who knows anything about seo doesn't use the meta keywords tag. Those that do are probably placing words and phrases in there not to help their page, but to get you to optimize for keywords that aren't all that important. That has been an actual seo strategy in the past to throw off competitors.

Also know that Google stopped sharing keyword data in analytics. It's harder, though not impossible to get useful keyword data. The industry is moving away from keyword focused optimization. Instead when you write content for a page have a theme in mind and use words and phrases that read well. Just ask yourself what the page is about and think about what words people might use to search for the general content on the page. Then mix those words and phrases into the page along with variations.

DavidProHQ
05-14-2014, 02:36 PM
Keep in mind anyone who knows anything about seo doesn't use the meta keywords tag.

So, so true.

As vangogh pointed out, what is in the title tag is most likely the keywords they are targeting.

What I like to do, is take the website and insert the url into SEMRush (you only get so many free searches a day in SEMRush) or SpyFu (it VERY awesome what they offer for the price of free).

I'll use SpyFu as an example. So I insert the first URL into SpyFu, and this is the page that pops up for me.
468

To the right you can see their Paid Keywords, meaning they are buying ads just for these keywords, so clearly they're targeting them. To the left, those are the keywords they're showing up for in the search engines, which is usually the keywords they're targeting as well, maybe not as specific. There's also tabs on the top of the website so you can look at SEO Reports and some other things, but I didn't need to do that with this.

On the next site, here is what I got once I inserted the URL and clicked on the SEO Reports Tab at the top.
469

That's just a little trick I like to use to monitor competitors, client sites, and competitors as well. I hope this helped!

billbenson
05-14-2014, 07:01 PM
Interesting post. I'm curious what others think about this here?

vangogh
05-15-2014, 02:43 AM
SEMrush and SpyFu both have good information. They're both go to sites for a lot of SEOs. You can still get keyword information. I thought I had a few articles bookmarked that talked about other ways to do keyword research, though I can't seem to find them at the moment. It was more about figuring out what keywords people were using to find you and not your competitors.

Here'a an article from Moz that talks about moving away keywords. It's titled, Keywords to Concepts: The Lazy Web Marketer's Guide to Smart Keyword Research (http://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts). The idea is that keywords are still important, but less as individual words and phrases and more as part of a theme or concept. Web pages will rank a pull traffic for lots of phrases on the page and all sorts of variations too.

Right now the most visited page on my site gets about 20k visits a month. Google is no longer providing all the keywords that led people there, but I remember before they stopped showing the data the top phrase maybe accounted for about 200 visits at most. The page pulls traffic because it ranks well for a lot of different phrases. I bet there are several thousand keyword phrases sending traffic to it. The majority might send only a single visit each month, but so what. I'm more concerned with the overall traffic to the page. I'm not worried about one two specific keywords.

Want to know how much optimization I did to get that traffic? Absolutely nothing. I wrote a post about something people have difficulty with and I showed them how to solve their problems. I did my best to make it the most useful post I could. The only time I thought about traffic when creating the page was when I wrote the title and that was more to entice people to click than worrying about where the page would rank. It does well because it's a useful post and people share it. There are over 100 comments on the post. Instead of worrying about search engines I wrote it to help real people. There's your secret to getting traffic.

10nnyson
05-15-2014, 11:30 AM
That 2nd site that you mentioned is optimized oh so poorly. But it's an interesting case study. Their title tag is 1021 characters long. It's stuffed with locational keywords and when I google the combination of "vehicle" mixed with the city they show up on page 1 every time. I used the keyword planner and plugged in the site domain and sure enough...all of the keywords that they are targeting in their title tag are represented there. Those keywords however are extremely low in search volume which is typical of a lot of local keywords depending on the industry.

Yeah I've worked with SEO professionals who have this sort of reckless approach, and sure you can get ranked by being spammy like this, but not for the long haul and then you've got a lot of work to do as you've just black marked your site. It's amazing how many SEOs that I've encountered who don't formulate a clear cut plan and instead do crazy stuff like this and tell me that "I only read up on black hat techniques to be in the know, but I don't practice black hat"...b.s.

I agree with vangogh...there are numerous tools to get keyword ideas and see projected search volumes and so forth, but at the end of the day when you are producing content...your focus should be on creating the best masterpiece that you can. When it's really amazing and you feel it in your heart and put your sweat into it - it shows and gets rewarded properly.

vangogh
05-15-2014, 04:24 PM
I noticed that too. It instantly said spam to me. They've written a full paragraph as a page title.


It's amazing how many SEOs that I've encountered who don't formulate a clear cut plan

I think those are the people you need to run from. It's certainly not the whole industry. Read a site like Moz and the sites of some of the people who write for the site and they clearly understand where seo fits in context. They might point out techniques that focus on some smaller detail, but they usually offer it in the larger context.

SEO is a form of marketing. For most, it should be part of your overall marketing. It's not marketing in and of itself and it's not a cure all for a failing business. Unfortunately the magic formula seo thinking still pervades. People need to check the dates on the articles they read and understand that a technique written in 2010 likely no longer works. The world of search changes quickly. What works today may not work tomorrow.

Oh and if you knew the secret to pulling a ton of traffic would you share it with the world? Neither would any good seo, since that knowledge is a competitive advantage. Many tips and techniques are only shared when they're just about to stop working.

DavidProHQ
05-15-2014, 09:44 PM
The secret to pulling in a ton of traffic is what you said in your previous post, "making the most useful post you could." Yeah, you might want to have a keyword or two, but if the content isn't worthy, it won't get shared, it won't be linked to by others, and it won't be seen as important in Google's eyes. A site without a lot of authority could write an article about SEO and title it with an exact phrase someone searches for in Google, and I'd bet Moz would still outrank them with only 1 or 2 keywords in the title. A problem with keywords is that people, or uneducated people, will stuff the keyword unnaturally, raising red flags to Google. Obviously, some keywords will show relevance to the search query, but many don't realize the "importance factor" that Google uses when it decides what results to display.

But, people like keywords and clients like keywords. I honestly like to see what keywords rank where because I'm a data junky and like to see numbers and such. Keywords aren't the holy grail, providing more value than the next person is what the key to being more visible on the internet. Almost exactly what you were saying vangogh.

vangogh
05-16-2014, 12:42 AM
Don't forget that with good content it won't matter much how many people visit, since they'll all leave.

I don't mean to imply that all you need to do is create great content and everything else falls into place. You do have to promote yourself, your site, and your business, at least in the beginning. No one is going to know who you are until you do. There won't be anyone there to share your content or link to it. Content is the first step and an essential step and sometimes I'll push that over everything else, because I get the feeling that step was skipped. Without the content the rest doesn't really matter.


A site without a lot of authority could write an article about SEO and title it with an exact phrase someone searches for in Google, and I'd bet Moz would still outrank them with only 1 or 2 keywords in the title

So true. It can be frustrating too if you don't have that authority, because it feels like you have to have it to get it and you're caught in this awful catch22.

I can't say I've ever focused too much on individual keywords or phrases. I was always more concerned with keyword themes. The article I mentioned in my last post was about something. I know what the general keyword theme is and without thinking too hard I know what main keyword phrase for the page is. I didn't think keywords though when working on the content. I just wrote the post. The theme is natural given the topic. I didn't force extra mentions of the phrase onto the page. I didn't have to. Since the page is focused on a topic it naturally uses those words. Because I know my industry well enough I'm also familiar with the words people would use to search for the content.

I did use the main phrase in the page title and by default WordPress uses the same for the main heading on the page. I just checked and it looks like I used the phrase 7 or 8 times throughout. The article is about 2,400 words. There's a breadcrumb on the page and it's mentioned there too since it's a repeat of the page title.

Granted I also know what I'm doing and my site was developed in a search friendly way, but I honestly wasn't focused on seo while writing the post.

Damon the Marketer
05-18-2014, 01:58 AM
Granted I also know what I'm doing and my site was developed in a search friendly way, but I honestly wasn't focused on seo while writing the post.

As of 2014, that's the new strategy for successful SEO blogging: Making your writing look like it's not written as an SEO article.

Victor Grimsley
05-19-2014, 05:51 AM
Keep in mind anyone who knows anything about seo doesn't use the meta keywords tag. Those that do are probably placing words and phrases in there not to help their page, but to get you to optimize for keywords that aren't all that important. That has been an actual seo strategy in the past to throw off competitors.

Also know that Google stopped sharing keyword data in analytics. It's harder, though not impossible to get useful keyword data. The industry is moving away from keyword focused optimization. Instead when you write content for a page have a theme in mind and use words and phrases that read well. Just ask yourself what the page is about and think about what words people might use to search for the general content on the page. Then mix those words and phrases into the page along with variations.

That's fake. We made a lot of experiments that shown that using keywords in meta still gives us a kind of positive result. It's not big at all, but it exists.

vangogh
05-19-2014, 11:05 AM
Please share your experiments and enlighten us. Search engines themselves have said for years that the meta keywords tag isn't something they use at all and it's hard to find them on the sites of the top SEOs in the industry.

Damon the Marketer
05-20-2014, 02:27 AM
That's fake. We made a lot of experiments that shown that using keywords in meta still gives us a kind of positive result. It's not big at all, but it exists.

Sure does. I've run similar experiments. Here's my theory behind the phenomenon:

I am a consumer searching for a dietician in Oklahoma City. So I type "Oklahoma City Dietician" in google.

Now I see many results and my eyes are draw to my keyword "which Google colors red for me." The red text in the meta descriptions will doubly draw my eye to your listing over others that don't have that keyword in the meta description.

The best thing to do, though, is to make your meta description into a CTA with your targeted keyword.

JamesF
05-20-2014, 11:06 AM
Damon the Marketer (and possibly Victor Grimsley), I just wanted to clear something up: it appears that vangogh is talking about the "meta keywords" tag, while you are talking about the "meta description" tag. The two have similar names, so it's easy to get confused.

I do agree with what you said about "meta descriptions." Although Google doesn't include them in their ranking algorithm, it can be very helpful to include keywords due to the fact that they appear in bold and the eye tends to be drawn to them.

However, when it comes to the "meta keywords" tag, which is a separate element, the search engines have indeed made it very clear they no longer serve a purpose in a website's ranking abilities.

James

singhabhishek251
11-15-2014, 04:38 AM
I was wondering what made you to check the meta keywords and think that they do not have any keyword for the website? keywords are not at all being used on any website and you need to find the competitor's keyword only by analysing their website.
You can see their URL, Title, H1, alt tags and go through the text content to see understand the strategy and keywords that they are targeting.

Phil Gregory Seo
03-05-2015, 06:04 AM
Why were you looking for the Keywords anyway, just to see if you could get ideas about who the competition were trying to rank for? I'm always surprised when I see sites still using them. More fool them though, I'll take their free keyword info and use for our clients.

david15beck
04-23-2015, 01:16 AM
If you are looking keywords in your source page then its a waste of time, search engines ignores keywords tag in website. if you want to promote your website from particular keyword. then insert your keyword in Meta Title or Meta Description. for more info about SEO techniques try Moz, its a best website for learn SEO.

dewalds86
09-29-2015, 05:15 AM
I am trying to view the keywords used for this site. longbeachschoolofyoga .com

I right click --> view page source

I do not see keywords listed in the code. Does this mean the site does not have keywords or could they possibly be hidden?

Are you sure because i just had a look at the source code and the keywords are used as follows:

<title>Long Beach Yoga Teacher Training, Ayurveda, Workshops</title> They are used in the page title


<meta name="description" content="Best yoga teacher training, certified yoga school, Ayurveda, yoga workshops, kids yoga and senior yoga,Orange County,Los Angeles, Long Beach"/> They are used in the meta description


<meta name="keywords" content="long beach yoga, Yoga Teacher Training, Yoga Training, Yoga workshops"/> They are also used in the meta keywords tags which by the way is no longer needed.

Appart from this the keywords are also used on the home page in the first paragraph.

Where did you expect the keywords to be?

dewalds86
09-29-2015, 05:26 AM
In the page source info I see Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v1.4.7, so SEO plugin is in use, but there are no keywords? I'm assuming keywords have not been inserted.

Similarly... I cannot see keywords at the top of page source for this site either and they come up #1 in google search for multiple cities. desertwraps .com

Had a look at this site as well and the page title is as follows:

<title>Vehicle Wraps and Graphics Palm Desert, CA, 92260 Car Graphic Wraps, Auto Graphic Wraps, desertwraps.com 2011. We service the entire Coachella Valley for Vehicle Wraps including, Vehicle Wraps Palm Desert, CA. Vehicle Wraps LA Quinta, CA. Vehicle Wraps Cathedral City, CA. Vehicle Wraps Rancho Mirage, CA. Vehicle Wraps Indian Wells, CA. Vehicle Wraps Indio, CA. Vehicle Wraps Palm Springs, CA. Vehicle Wraps Thousand Palms, CA. Vehicle Wraps Desert Hot Springs, CA. Vehicle Wraps Yucca Valley, CA. Vehicle Wraps Banning, CA. Vehicle Wraps Morongo, CA..We service the entire Coachella Valley for Vehicle Wraps including, Vehicle Wraps Palm Desert, CA. Vehicle Wraps LA Quinta, CA. Vehicle Wraps Cathedral City, CA. Vehicle Wraps Rancho Mirage, CA. Vehicle Wraps Indian Wells, CA. Vehicle Wraps Indio, CA. Vehicle Wraps Palm Springs, CA. Vehicle Wraps Thousand Palms, CA. Vehicle Wraps Desert Hot Springs, CA. Vehicle Wraps Yucca Valley, CA. Vehicle Wraps Banning, CA. Vehicle Wraps Morongo, CA. <http://desertwraps.com/></title>

This must be the longest page title I have ever seen. Normally a page title should look like this:

Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword | Company Name

A page title should ideally have a length of no more than 60 characters.

The meta keyword tag is no longer necessary to be used. This being said, there are many places where you should use keywords such as page title, meta description, H1 and H2 headings, img alt tags and of course in the content of the page.

jawal
10-01-2015, 04:14 AM
If you want to check the keywords of other websites then try Keyword tool and mention the website address while searching then you will get all keywords what they are optimising and using on website including hidden also.

janefirst
10-05-2015, 06:47 AM
It has some keywords in title tag, description tag and content. Content of your site has not all keywords that are required for proper information on your home page. There should be at least 500 to 600 words on home page to understand your website's information successfully.