Meta key words not showing

@cullachie In regards to your concern about your keywords not appearing as metadata in your page’s source code, focus keywords do not add any additional data to your page. The focus keyword feature is only an analysis of your page to optimize the keyword usage and density in the page’s content and other metadata (title, meta description, slug, etc).

There is another type of keywords called meta keywords which do add metadata to your page’s source code, however meta keywords have been removed from Yoast SEO Premium as of version 6.3. As meta keywords have not been used by search engines for a long time we have chosen to no longer include them as a feature. If you wish to optimize your page for a keyword we would recommend using the focus keyword feature of the Yoast SEO Premium plugin.

We have an article which explains in further detail why we didn’t recommend using them, and why they were disabled by default at the following link: https://yoast.com/meta-keywords/

My OP said specifically “meta key words.” and you say that “meta keywords have been removed from Yoast SEO Premium as of version 6.3.?“

So why has this feature not been removed from the standard version if it’s no longer relevant?

Now you say that we should use the “focus keyword feature of the Yoast SEO Premium plugin.

Should I read between the lines or could you elucidate further?

Hello @cullachie, there’s nothing to read between the lines.

I have scanned our site using Screaming Frog ( very good tool) and it is reporting that none of our products has any meta key words.

What Screaming Frog reports you don’t have can no longer be added with the Yoast SEO free (or Premium). It looked something like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="seo, search engine
optimisation, search engine optimization,
search engine ranking">

The Yoast SEO free allows you to add a focus keyword/keyphrase while the Yoast SEO Premium allows you to add one focus keyword/keyphrase and four additional/related keywords/keyphrases.

We have entered between 3 and 8 key words depending on the product and they are not showing.

Please share a screenshot of where you have entered between 3 and 8 key words depending on the product in the Yoast SEO plugin. You can use any image-sharing service like https://pasteboard.co/, https://snag.gy/, https://imgur.com/, https://snipboard.io/, or even upload the screenshot to your own website. Once you upload it to an image-sharing service, please share the link to the image here.

Here we go..

https://snipboard.io/cgZdk8.jpg

https://snipboard.io/oj8uN7.jpg

I’ve annotated your screenshot. See here. You have added one focus keyphrase but fourteen product tags. These are no meta keywords; they’re two different things. You can see the product tags in the product tag sitemap here

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