Blogging
Keyword confusion
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18 Jun 2003
Scott blogged about an IM conversation he had where someone asked him if he worked for me. Apparently they had been reading my Build Your Brand entry and noticed the fact that Scott’s name appears in the keyword meta tag for the page.
Let me explain why it’s there. I use Movable Type’s keywords field for two main purposes. One is to help generate my Related Entries lists. The other is for my site search engine, which is currently powered by Atomz. Atomz allows me to assign a higher weighting to certain tags, the meta keyword tag being one of them. If an entry has “Scott Johnson” in the meta keywords, it should rank well in a site search for Scott. (It should, but Atomz isn’t indexing all my pages right now. I’ll explain that in another blog entry).
I’m not sure why the fact that having Scott’s name in my meta tags would lead someone to believe that he works for me. It was in there because the entry had a passage about Scott (with his permission, I might add). It seems to me that keyword metadata is there to provide context to the text for machines. People can understand the context on their own, but machines need someone to tell them the context.
I’m pretty sure Martha Stewart doesn’t work for AOL Time Warner or have any connection to their Business 2.0 publication. But the Web page for an article about her has her name in the keywords meta tag, along with that of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Apple, the FDA, and many others…
<meta name="Description" content="Martha’s stock-trading scandal shows what can go wrong when a company’s intellectual assets get too concentrated."><br />
<meta name="keywords" content ="Martha Stewart, investing, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, ImClone, Erbitux, Sam Waksal, Arthur Andersen, Wedding List, Xerox, Enron, Tyco, Food and Drug Administration, intellectual assets, risk management, Johnson & Johnson, Tylenol, human capital, structural capital, patents, documents, methodologies, databases, knowledge artifacts, customer capital, shareholders, Steve Jobs, Apple, Bill Gates, Microsoft, Stewart, Thomas A. , MSO, IMCL">Other bloggers do this too. Brad Choate lists the subjects of his entries in his keywords metadata. An entry about CSS books lists Eric Meyer in the keywords.
So my question to you. Is this wrong? Should I not put people’s names into my keywords? Since there are no major search engines that index the keywords meta, I’m not concerned with this being viewed as an attempt a keyword stuffing, but I want to avoid misleading people. Scott says he has a funny feeling about the practice because it confused someone. He understands why his name is in the keywords, but is concerned that people may be getting the wrong impression.
Perhaps we can come up with a generally accepted practice for metadata in the blogging community. I’ve removed the keywords meta tag for the time being while we consider this issue.