3 replies to this topic

[monsterslime]

Hey there been lurking the forums for awhile now and reading on the beginner SEO tips and various posts from other users on this site. Great resources here but can't seem to find an answer through search and I have a gut feeling I know the answer already but just wanted an expert opinion.

A site i'm working on right now deals with Heating, Air Conditioning, Geothermal based in Longueil and Montreal (Quebec, Ontario, Canada). On one of the testimonial pages where it is all french they use the term Climatisation which is Air Conditioning in french. Would it be a bad practice to put the english version in the keywords even though it does not show up in this particular page.

My gut says not to do this since Google would not be able to reference any paragraphs with the term Air Conditioning but the main focus of this SEO implementation is Air Conditioning in Montreal / Longueuil Quebec since that is where they are based.

Thanks for any help!

[Jill]

Would it be a bad practice to put the english version in the keywords even though it does not show up in this particular page.

If you mean the meta keywords tag, Google ignores it completely so it won't matter.

However, that's actually the perfect use for the tag for an engine like Yahoo who does use it. I wouldn't expect it to have much (if any) effect, but it won't hurt anything.

[qwerty]

Is the entire site in French, or will you be doing an English version as well? There are plenty of English speakers in Quebec -- in fact, I've met people in Montreal who out and out refuse to speak French.

If you're doing a bilingual site, then the English version of that page would be the place to use keywords that are the English equivalents of the French ones, but I'm talking about the content of the page, not its meta data. As Jill says, the meta keywords tag is completely irrelevant to Google.

[monsterslime]

Thanks for the quick responses. I guess I won't worry too much about meta keywords and see how I can make the relevant content better (there's an english version and french) since the products are based upon exactly what users would search for that product area/industry.