Meta keywords per product and category worth the time?

[lindapowers]

Hi

using vm 2.018b and joomla 2.58

I have been reading the forum and trying to find an specific article about SEO for virtuemart 2 but can't really find much.

My doubt is about the importance of adding Meta keywords per product and categories in virtuemart 2.

Does this really affect SEO?
How many keywords are recommended?

I think I read somewhere that keywords are ignored nowadays by google or are not as important as before and can do more harm than good to your ranking.

Would be nice to hear someone's opinion about it.

Thanks

[Maxim Pishnyak]

Some basic specific keywords are still welcome I believe. Just be carefull and base your choice of used kewords on their density/popularity in your text. It's hard to have more then 4-5 keywords in meta section, no? Product article is written for humans, so it's not possible to have more keys that are really popular in particular text.

I remember one VM moderator recommended using meta info (description and kewords) for products and categories. He advised to put this stuff manually, and don't use automatic hacks for improving seo meta in vm.

[lindapowers]

Thanks thief

Yeah we did that in the past with our old website in one language but with 4 languages we were thinking if is worth the time.

I read people as you say that recommend using a few keywords and others say is a waste of time and that there page ranks pretty good without entering a single keyword.

[Peter Pillen]

This video opened my eyes concerning meta tags ... maybe it helps http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBTBEfd7z_Y and earlier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aHv-mXaNds

Google does not look at your keyword metatag only when a surfer uses keyword filters. And apparantly a lot of other search engines don't bother about keywords also.

[lindapowers]

Thanks a lot for the videos, that is what I was exactly looking for, much happier ignoring the keywords metatags, one nightmare less

[Peter Pillen]

Well... the nightmare is still there, but in a different form. You might wanna read up on Google's new algoritmes that are important for pageranking (Joomla article on panda en penguin algoritme). Concerning SEO, google webmaster tools and Google best practice guidelines has a big influence on your site rankings. So you should be focussing on those issues.

Webshops can very quick be flagged as spam or duplicate content because of the simple fact that we use the same setup over and over again, just with a different product. Google is very secretive about their algoritme, but there are a lot of quality blogs and videos about this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSP05I8SciM)

[Maxim Pishnyak]

.. and others say is a waste of time ..

You're welcome, Lindapowers.

Oh, just curious is it so much time must to be wasted? Regular content manager could enter 4-5 keywords easily during creating product/category description. It could take maybe 2-3 minutes for each article.

Comparing with the time which is necessary to get high ranks in search engines (monthes, years)... I can't think that work with keywords could be called wasting of time at all.

[lindapowers]

3-4 minutes in a website in 6 languages with 30 products?

mmmmm yeah fantastic clock you have a part from the fact that if you enter keywords they must be usefull somehow and entered with logic, of course we can make it random and fast but whats the use of that.

If Matt Cutts the head of Spam at google says is a waste of time maybe is cause is a waste ot time

[Maxim Pishnyak]

This video opened my eyes concerning meta tags ... earlier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aHv-mXaNds

That's right. From one side approx 15 hours of work (5 mins for creating keywords on each page individually). From other side this could be useful in such thing in this video that was mentioned by RichardBaldock on 0:50 second. This possible usefulness of keywords isn't attractive for you at all? Can I ask why?

From another point of view you will know what words are important for certain eshop pages that will be promoted later. You will know order of these words too. When you will place links on another website that could be useful knowledge. Knowledge that could help you to construct word snippet around your link.

P.S. 6 languages really impressed me. What was the plan? Use all languages on one domain or use something like language domain.

Also I have heard that seo work for non-main language parts of website is really unthankful job. Separate domains for each language could be more successful for advertising in search engines.

[Peter Pillen]

I will certainly not pretend to be a SEO wizzard, but ...

Google's market share for search engine use for 2012 is 80%, bing 10% and yahoo 7% (source). I know for sure that bing and yahoo will also use a more advanced algoritme to index pages. So no ... I don't find it usefull at all to spend time on keywords. Because using meta keywords can also get you penalties if you apply them incorrect. I do set them on my blog and main pages, but I will not spend time perfecting each and every page.

The same story goes for facebook... since Edgerank apparantly only 20% of your followers see updates on their newsfeed from your company page (source). If you want the other 80% seeing your updates, you need to pay. Only visitors that regularly check your page themselves automatic are shown the updates. Since I started posting more nonsense than product ads on my facebook company page, I get more traffic from facebook, more likes, more shares and more sales.

and so on... and so on...

Me personally... I believe that it is much more valuable to spend your time improving your (visible) content and website ergonomics (so to speak) than bothering about such details. Just get your visitors to view multiple pages, stay a long time on your site, returning to your site for a second visit, ... and so on. Each search engine will pretty quick pick up that your site must have good content for the entered search string, because every time the search engines show your page in the results they see low bouncerates, many pageviews, long visit times, people talking about you on social media, and so on ...

My SEO tactic in short ... QUALITY & FUN ... focus on your visitors ... not the searchbots.

[lindapowers]

I'm a bit confused about what you mention of the domains Maxim,

We are doing it in the common way, each language has is own language url under the same domain. website /es, website/en , website/it etc

Why should we use a domain for each language if we can change the title, homepage, metatags and everything for each language? (I'm asking not being ironic)

In VM2 you can edit all the meta information per category, product and language... and that is not a 3 minute task if you plan to do it well.


The more I read the net about this, the more clear it comes that meta keywords are quite useless these days and I just wanted to know out of people were actually using them.

We ignored meta keywords in the past and went pretty well for us but we do work in the H1, H2, titles etc but I agree with Peter in that is the quality of the unique content what matters.

Regards

[Maxim Pishnyak]

Yes, I see your point about keywords, guys. Pretty reasonable I must admit. Every1 want to have fun and me too ofc.

As for language domains, I think that seo weight of website.es is bigger then possible power of website/es .

[lindapowers]

mmmm well, considering they are all pointing at the same domain how I see it is that instead of having one .es you have that same one and also /en /it /fr which doubles your content and your options of being found.

[Maxim Pishnyak]

Nope, I'm not talking about duplicating content on your project. Cos all language parts of it has own unique stuff (in different languages).

Think about it. Could Google respects .es domain of your project with your "es" stuff more then /es part (with the same "es" stuff) of multilingual webshop?

Yes, I know that VM could help administer multilingual webshop well, but it could be more successful to seo separate language domains (separate language vm installations) of one ecommerce project.

From what I heard it is the question of fail or success. /es like part of multilingual webshop couldn't concure well at all. For small bussiness vm multilanguage model is good .. in administrating. But is it good in seo promotion? For small or medium bussiness?

Owner of multilingual eshop could pay for separate language domain (.es etc ) each and for their hosting too. This boss could waste some additional resources to prepare promoting own brand in each language area. Could search engine respects such efforts more then in case of vm-engaged multilingual eshop where only ONE domain is used?

In the model that I'm talking about, each language domain links to any other language domain main page.

For example as you know ebay use separate language domains
http://www.ebay.co.uk/
http://www.ebay.ru/
http://www.ebay.com/
and ebay could be on Joomla+Vm.

[lindapowers]

Yep cause ebay have what? 2000 workers?

They probably use a database for each country managed by people in that country.

Do you really want a small company to manage 4 databases?

Isn't easier to manage it all at one website?

Regards