Website Keywords Question

[M_Lyons10]

Hi everyone.  I actually have a questions about something I saw in keywords used for an existing site today that I wanted to ask everyone.

I've always seen keywords following this format: red, green, blue, yellow.

However, today I saw: red | green | blue | yellow.

As I've never seen this format used before, I wanted to ask if this was effectively treated the same and only a matter of preference, or if one was handled differently than the other by search engines.

Thanks for the help.

[Jack W]

Hey M_Lyons10,

It depends where you're using these keywords.

For example, if, for some reason, you're still using the obsolete meta keywords tag - then you will use the comma format as normal.

However, if you are using keywords in your <title> tag, you want to use this format: PAGE NAME - SITE NAME | Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword

Hope that helps!

[Ryoken]

Should also be noted that while abuse of keywords can get a site marked down, for all intents and purposes, they are ignored by relevant search engines, who only care about the Content and not what YOU say the page is about in the head.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Yeah, I don't know of any search engines that still use the keyword/description stuff. They depend on your page content more than anything.

Edit: Actually does anything use the description stuff? not even browsers use it to pre-fill the description field of bookmarks.

[MikeChipshop Member]

The pipe ( '|' ) symbol was always a separation character and is still used and recognised as such, mainly used in the titles of sites now to denote where the name stops and the description/location starts.

For instance "My Website | Home" or "All about cakes | Bakery.com", however it's pretty much a non issue as the keyword tag is pretty much redundant.
Those sites that do use the pipe as a method of separation, probably find it does work though.

[M_Lyons10]

Hey M_Lyons10,

It depends where you're using these keywords.

For example, if, for some reason, you're still using the obsolete meta keywords tag - then you will use the comma format as normal.

However, if you are using keywords in your <title> tag, you want to use this format: PAGE NAME - SITE NAME | Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword

Hope that helps!

I'm sorry it took me so long to respond on this, I've been trying to figure out why I couldn't respond to posts on Neowin anymore and it appears that the forums no longer support Firefox?  So, now I have to fire up Chrome or Edge when I want to respond to a note, nifty...

I wanted to thank everyone for your help, I really appreciate your clarification.  I just wasn't sure as I always used ','...  

Jack W: Would you mind clarifying or providing an example of putting keywords in your title tag?  I'm still a bit unclear on that and am not sure I know what you mean.  Would these keywords then show up in the title?

Thanks again everyone!

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

You'd be sticking the keywords in the page title, so yeah they'd show up there.

Like the title of this page, you've got the actual thread title, then the forum section and site name are included. Just don't go overboard, because it looks bad, just 1-2 at most

[Layla89]

How did you make a keywords research? Which tools did you use for this?

If this topic still has you interested...