Search Keywords, Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions; Keeping Webmaster Tools Current
-
What are Search Keywords, Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions? What exactly is the difference between them and which one is more important?
In regards to Webmaster Tools, if we delete a page or a product, it still shows up in Search Analytics. How can we update Webmaster Tools so as to keep it current with our website?
Lastly, again in regards to Webmaster Tools, in Search Analytics. At the moment we put relevant queries into the Meta Description of low ranking pages, in order to raise the position of the page. Is this the right way to handle queries? Should we be putting the queries into the Meta Description or the Meta Keywords?
-
Wow, there are a lot of questions in here! I'll take a couple of them:
In Webmaster Tools, "Search Keywords" refers to search terms that are currently returning your site. These are (some of) the searches that are leading people to you.
You can read about meta description here. It's basically your way to have a say in the text that accompanies your listing on the SERPs. Using keywords in your meta description will not help you rank, but it may increase the likelihood that folks will click on your link when they receive your page as a search result, provided they're used as part of relevant, intriguing copy that effectively communicates to potential visitors what they can expect the page to be about.
Meta keywords is an older tag that allows you to list the important keywords for a given page in the page's code itself. It's generally considered out-of-date and to not do you any good. I'd recommend not using it, as it's little more than a great way to tell your competitors what you're working on.
Honestly, it sounds as if you'd really benefit from reading through our Beginner's Guide to SEO. It'll leave you with a much better understanding.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Conflicting average position data from Google Search Console?
I'm looking at Google Search Console data in Google Analytics, specifically Average Position as given in the Landing Page report, and the same metric broken out by mobile and desktop in the Devices report. In the Landing Page report, I see an aggregated average position that's much higher/worse than an actual average of what is reported for mobile, desktop and tablet traffic under the Device reporting. For example: Mobile: 5 Desktop: 5 Tablet: 5 So the average still should be roughly 5, right? Why would the Landing Page then show an aggregate Average Position of 8? I wouldn't expect to see a precisely same average given that different device types have different proportions that could render differently when the buckets are combined, but this is a huge swing. In fact, the aggregate Average Position as given in the top level Devices report is closer to 5 than to the 8 shown in the Landing Pages report. (These aren't actual numbers, but are illustrative of what I'm seeing, by the way.) Unless I'm missing some vital difference in the way that Average Position is reporting for the Landing Page report versus the Device reports, it doesn't seem like this should be possible. What am I missing?
Reporting & Analytics | | BradsDeals0 -
Keyword Opportunities in Insights Area Suggest SPAM Keywords?
Happy Holidays Moz family, We were recently reviewing our insights on an account and the keywords suggested were: 1. malibog pinoy sex story 2. desi bhabhi ki chudai 3. cennai mamies pundai mulai Clearly these are SPAM or something. We have run malware scans of the site, used Google Webmaster tools to identify incoming and outgoing links and don't see anything. I have also exported the entire site to Notepad++ and searched for these terms. Nothing. Any ideas or suggestions? Thank you in advance for any suggestions! We're having some ranking issues with the same site so perhaps this is the root of the issue. The site has some great links.
Reporting & Analytics | | Tosten0 -
Hey guys, any advice on why my 'search analytics' in Google Webmaster tools is blank with no data?
I have added all the website versions into Google web master tools and I have no crawl errors. When I click on Search traffic these pages are blank - search analytics, & Mobile usability. And When I fetch as Google the status is constantly saying me 'temporarily unreachable' - any help would be greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | HLAS0 -
How to get multiple pages to appear under main url in search - photo attached
How do you get a site to have an organized site map under the main url when it is searched as in the example photo? SIte-map.png
Reporting & Analytics | | marketingmediamanagement0 -
Webmaster Tools Records
Hey, I'm trying to find a way of getting data from Googles Webmaster Tools and recording it in either a database or spread sheet. Is there any software out there that I can use to do this or would i have to look at developing it my self? Thanks, Luke.
Reporting & Analytics | | NoisyLittleMonkey0 -
"not selected" is gone from Google Webmaster Tools Index Status Advanced
Just noticed today that the "not selected" has been removed from the Index status, Advanced section of Google Webmaster Tools. Anyone know why. I've used this metric to determine how or why Google was not selecting pages, particularly to gauge canonical's, 301's and duplicate content. It will be missed if gone for good.
Reporting & Analytics | | tdawson090 -
Webmaster Tools shows 0 visits, Analytics shows 1000s?
Webmaster Tools reported a "Big traffic change for top URL" for one of our sites about three and a half weeks ago. WT traffic is 0 since that date. However, our analytics data shows no significant decline in traffic. The WT alert was received on Nov. 16. There was a significant dip in GA visits Nov. 22 but it recovered and I'm seeing no other indication that this is a penalty. What could be going on?
Reporting & Analytics | | IMM0 -
Ways to analyze a 1M rows dataset of search queries
Hi, I have this large dataset, about 1 million search queries with visits, bounce rate and a few other metrics. I'm trying to explore this data to find keyword "buckets" (such as include product name, location name, transactional objective, informational, etc.), as well as explore the density of certain keywords (keywords as in instances of a single word amongst all queries) My idea was to use Excel and a macro to split all queries in separate words (also clearing punctuation and uppercase/lowercase), then storing this word in a new worksheet, adding to another column the visit counts from the row where the word was extracted (as to give a sense of weight). Before adding the word to the new worksheet, the script will look if the word already existed, if so it would just add the current value of visits to the existing visit counts etc. In the end it will create sort of a "dictionary" of all the keywords in all search queries ranked by weight (= visits from search query including this keyword) This would help me get started I believe, because I can't segment and analyze 1M raw search queries... My issue is: this VBA has been running on my (fast) PC for the last 24hr and it doesn't seem to get to an end. Obviously excel+VBA is not the best way to do text mining and manipulation in such a large dataset (although it's just a 30mb file) What would you do if you had this dataset and would like to mine the text/semantic as I am doing? Any idea of tools? process? I'm considering dumping this data into a MySQL db and doing the processing through PHP (the only backend language I'm versed in), and getting the "summified" data stored into another table, which I'll then be able to export to a Excel for analysis. But I'm afraid that I'll be facing memory limit issues and such... In the meantime, I'm definitely interested into knowing what you guys would do if you had this data and wanted to simply start exploring its constituencies Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | briacg0