keyword order in meta tag

Couldn't find a good answer with the forums search for this question:

Does the order of words in the keyword tag make a difference?

For example;

I sell widgets and offer free shipping and price match, so I want to target red widgets, blue widgets, yellow widgets, free shipping, and price match.

Does
look any different to a search engine than

My thinking being putting the all the widgets in a row looks more spammy than the second one.

Thoughts?

-Greg

Hi stinkoman,

Are you sure that any search engines still are still using the keyword-tag?

of course i'm not positive one way or another, but the last seo firm I worked at, the owner would spend hours coming up with the right meta tags, and go to the top 10 results in google for "search engine optimization" and they all have detailed meta tags.

-Greg

Hi Greg,

I sure would like to find a answer to this question.

I read somewhere that Yahoo is looking at the keyword tag, but not giving a lot of value to it.

For those that do read it, and there are a few, but mostly smaller ones, the old thinking was the most important keywords would be at the beginning, and the less important ones toward the end.

I would not worry about it unless your site is floundering.... The content, the title tag, and meta description tag are the 3 most important things, in my opinion. Everything else after that is extra.

Yahoo is looking at the keyword tag. Put the keywords in order of importance. Have a different keyword/title/decription for each page on your site. :smile:

Hi Christian SEO,

Could you please give some examples of smaller search engines that do use the keyword meta tag?

Thank you.

Hi Gail,

Do you know if the keyword tag carries enough weight to make a difference in Yahoo?

Thank you.

It can't really hurt you so you may aswell put them in order...

I do. While most webmasters tend to think its pointless it has given me good results so far, even as far as getting ranked first on a few keywords with it in nothing more than the meta tag. If the meta tag does (which im inclined to believe, albeit, i dont think it carries much weight) count then order would be important for keyword prominence...

I have to confess that I truly think the kw meta is a thing of the past as far as importance (except for smaller meta based SE's). It is title, description and text relevance now, but I still put the kw's in; superstitious maybe.

Sorvoja, if you go to http://www.splatsearch.com/submit.html and use the submit preview you will see that they grab title, description, and keywords from your site.

There are a number of others that also do this, but I don't remember which ones.

By the way, thanks for asking! There are too many people that say things with little or nothing to back up what they say. If someone has proof or documentation they should post it. If it's just opinion, they should say that.

At the SES conference in NY, the guy from Yahoo said that their search engine is looking at the keyword tag and that it is a good idea to put them in order of importance.

Gail,

For meta based engines that is true. But, Yahoo is also now supposedly switching to relevancy. With G and Y going relevancy, the importance of meta keywords are diminished greatly. Rumor has it the G does not even read the meta kw string. That leaves only the minor SE's.

I still put the meta kw string in and in order, but do not believe it buys me much.

Hello Christian_SEO,

Thank you for the example.

SEO_AM This info came out of the mouth of the Yahoo guy in March 2004. Has there been a change or announcement since then? I know what people SUPPOSEDLY are saying.

But, the kw meta might be ONE of the factors used to determine what is relavant.