Keywords

I notice there is a field for adding breadcrumbs for every page. My theme is supposed to do that itself although I dont see the breadcumbs on the page. Does anyone know if I would be better advised to turn of the themes breadcrumbs and use Yoasts breadcrumbs ?

I was wrong it seems there is only breadcrumb navigation for the archive pages. This means I have a lot of pages I would need to go back through to add breadcrumbs too. If anyone has experience with this feature would you say it is worth me taking the time to go back through every page to add breadcrumbs and are there any general rules as to how I should structure a breadcrumb ie should it be the title of the page or a more generic subtitle?
Thanks
Andrew

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by ahamaton.

I have found the keywords feature but there is a quote under it saying

“I don’t know why you’d want to use meta keywords, but if you want to, enable this.”

So, I dont want to ask a stupid question but is this implying there is no worth in adding meta keywords ? and are meta keywords in general worthless because I spend quite a lot of time in the default kewords field I have on wordpress. I am not sure if the keyword field I have is default to the theme I use or to wordpress so if there isnt one by default with wordpress this must be something the theme’s author developed.
Thanks
Andrew

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by ahamaton.

I have found the keywords feature but there is a quote under it saying

“I don’t know why you’d want to use meta keywords, but if you want to, enable this.”

So, I dont want to ask a stupid question but is this implying there is no worth in adding meta keywords ? and are meta keywords in general worthless because I spend quite a lot of time in the default kewords field I have on wordpress. I am not sure if the keyword field I have is default to the theme I use or to wordpress so if there isnt one by default with wordpress this must be something the theme’s author developed.
Thanks
Andrew

Google no longer ranks keywords.
Most people pay for the full yoast version to get the extra keywords option, however this is no longer necessary as google no longer ranks it.

Thanks Jacques
Thats interesting how do you know that ?

Are you from Yoast Jacques ?

@ahamaton The Yoast SEO focus keyword is used internally by the content analysis feature to provide feedback on how to improve your content and is specifically not the same as the meta keywords referenced by @jacquesfresco.

By default, our plugin doesn’t give you a field to enter meta keywords, as meta keywords have been proven to be mostly a waste of time. Joost has written an article on meta keywords that explains this in more detail.

Thanks Amboutwe. I think that answers my question. The thing is I know the Yoast Mte Keyword feature isnt used but my theme has a keyword tool. I spend a lot of time adding keywords and I think from that article I could be making a lot better use of my time. So thanks for the advice.
Andrew

I’ve seen no results for all the effort in to keywords I’ve even wondered whether it could be counterproductive if google sees it as spam or something. Is that at all possible because if it is I will go through and clean out all the keywords or do you think google just ignores them so it doesn’t matter as obviously taking them all out will take a but of time as well

The keywords entered outside of our plugin are called tags in WordPress core. We have an article on how to use tags properly here: https://yoast.com/tagging-posts-properly-for-users-and-seo/

Thanks for that. I’ll have a proper look on Monday because I do think I am over-taggin however, the field Im talking about which isnt part of yoast is called keywords. Assuming that is actually tags i scanned the link you sent me and it seemed to say yoast can report on those tags. I havent seen any opportunity for that in yoast and not sure how it would do it anyway as it only reads the article. It doesnt give me any guidance on the tags I use at all. Are you maybe referring to the words I use in the content or is it possible that what I’m talking about isnt covered by that article ? I’ll have a proper look when I’m next at my desk and see if I can make sense of it. From our discussions though I think it is very likely I am going to need to take out most if not all of the keywords I’ve added to the item pages in my theme. Thanks again, Andrew

Having read that article I’m a bit confused. The field in my theme, where you enter the ‘tags’ labels them as keywords. However, it does look and feel very much like tags you would use with youtube for example. All I know is my gut feeling is they are not helping and could be hindering my rankings. The article seems to say use a parent page as the tag but it also seems to say only use unique tags for each page. The pages I’m referring to are effectively adverts that sit within a category and the page above would work for multiple adverts meaning they would have the same tag. I wish I could tell if these keywords are actually going in to the coding but it’s all a bit beyond me, because I’m not sure if the words are even visible to google. I just think the best thing to do is take all the miriad of keywords Ive added out for now.

OK, so I have found that the meta data promoted by Yoast works very effectively (I know duhh) and the keywords I referred to are a waste of time (I know, told you so). My next question is I have been told bolding keywords in your text is a good idea. But I have read on some sites, this is an out of date tactic and google feels it is a tactic that was abused. Also it doesn’t seem that Yoast measures this. So is bolding text a good idea, a bad idea or just a waste of time as it doesnt matter?