Member Avatar for witty4u

Is the following meta tag appropriate for a site that sells books? <meta name="Keywords" content="books,publish,reading,author,genres,cover,novel" />

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by canadafred

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Short answer: skip chasing the meta keywords tag for ranking. was on target — Google ignores the keywords meta tag, and the tag is effectively legacy. and are right to flag other engines, but those signals are marginal and can even be used for spam detection; investing time in visible page signals gives a far better ROI. (developers.google.com)

Focus instead on the things that move clicks and understanding. The title element should clearly contain the book title and author (and format when relevant); it’s the primary text users see in results. The meta description is used by Google for snippets when it helps describe the page, so make each product page’s description unique and useful — include author, edition/format, price or availability cue, and a short USP to improve CTR (remember Google may rewrite snippets for certain queries). (developers.google.com)

For an online bookstore, add structured data and clean on-page content. Implement Book/Offer JSON‑LD (name, author, isbn, publisher, datePublished, image, offers with price/availability, and aggregateRating/review if available) so search engines and shopping surfaces can understand editions and availability. Use canonical tags for duplicates (editions/formats), unique product descriptions and customer reviews, and Open Graph/Twitter cards for social shares. Here’s a minimal JSON‑LD pattern to adapt:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context":"https://schema.org",
  "@type":"Book",
  "name":"Example Book Title",
  "author":"Author Name",
  "isbn":"9781234567890",
  "offers":{
    "@type":"Offer",
    "price":"14.99",
    "priceCurrency":"USD",
    "availability":"https://schema.org/InStock",
    "url":"https://example.com/book/example-book"
  }
}
</script>

Use Google’s Book/structured-data guidance and schema.org as your reference when building feeds and per-book markup. Prioritize unique titles, descriptive meta descriptions, rich JSON‑LD, and readable product copy over keyword meta tags. (developers.google.com)

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Member Avatar for jay 11

Is the following meta tag appropriate for a site that sells books? <meta name="Keywords" content="books,publish,reading,author,genres,cover,novel" />

Sure that's fine - but keep in mind that Google does Not use the keywords meta tag for any type of web ranking.

Member Avatar for AirForceOne

Right, it is right in syntax but might be polished to be more accurate. :)
Of course, there is another more important meta tag, it is meta description tag. :)

Member Avatar for canadafred

Not for google, but in yahoo and bing it is still effective...

That's a good point.

Now, Google certainly examine's the tag, as the keyowrds tag is a search engine tag and also because Google covers and considers every line of code; regardless of what it is. The meta keywords tags is an indicator as to what you feel are the important keywords/keyphrases for each web page. It may decisively disagree.

The original poster made suggestions that were too vague for my liking, too generic. Rather than something like "books,publish,reading,author,genres,cover,novel", I'd try something more like "painting book romance novel published author Fred Joly".

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