Keywords

Advice of the use of the Keywords field on the Document Properties page of the editor interface in MKDoc 1.0

This compulsory and important field is used by MKDoc's internal search engine ranking system, the Dublin Core Metadata subject and keywords field and by some external search engines to index web pages.

The edit or add keywords and subjects simply edit the Keywords form field, seperating words with comers.

MKDoc search engine

In MKDoc, searchable database fields are weighted. This means that a word in the Keywords field will have a greated weight compared with one which is in the document body and will have a higher priority in the search results.

This means that in order to make the search engine efficient, great attention should be spend on the Description and Keywords fields.

Dublin Core Subject and Keywords

The Dublin Core specification includes the following comment about the subject and keywords field.

Typically, a Subject will be expressed as keywords, key phrases or classification codes that describe a topic of the resource. Recommended best practice is to select a value from a controlled vocabulary or formal classification scheme.

MKDoc 1.0 is not set up to allow editors to add qualified subjects (chosing keywords from a restricted list of words), though this is planned for future versions.

This is how the comma-seperated Keywords for this document are representated in the DC RDF file for this document:

<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">MKDoc</dc:subject>
<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">help</dc:subject>
<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">Dublin Core</dc:subject>
<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">keywords</dc:subject>
<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">subject</dc:subject>
<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">subject and keywords</dc:subject>
<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">search engine</dc:subject>
<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">metadata</dc:subject>
<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">indexing</dc:subject>
<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">information</dc:subject>
<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">semantic web</dc:subject>
<dc:subject xml:lang="en-gb">document properties </dc:subject>

MKDoc 1.0 assumes that the Language of the Keywords matches that of the document. Future version of MKDoc will allow the language of individual keywords to be specified.

<meta> Keywords

MKDoc also used the Keywords field for the <meta> that are used by search engines.

This is what the HTML <meta> keywords tag looks like at the head of this document:

<meta name="keywords" 
      content="MKDoc, help, Dublin Core, keywords, subject, 
               subject and keywords, search engine, metadata, 
               indexing, information, semantic web, document 
               properties" />

The AltaVista advice about the use of keywords is worth noting. However, MKDoc search-engine keywords are probably more important:

AltaVista indexes every word on every page, and every word (and the order in which they appear) is important. The purpose of the "keyword" METAtag is simply to allow you to add synonyms -- words that are appropriate for what's on your page -- that describe what's there but that do not actually appear on that page

If you are concerned about external search engines' ranking of you site you should probably consult additional resources about HTML meta keywords. A good starting point for this is the Dmoz page of meta tag links.