Now that
we've covered the all-important
title
tag and
meta
description tag, it's time to move on to the very misunderstood
and abused meta keyword tag.
Everyone knows
that to obtain high search engine rankings all you have to do is
put the keywords that you want to rank high with into your meta
keywords tag, right? Not even close! If it were that simple, I'd
certainly be out of work. How many of you reading this column
have obsessed over the meta keyword tag? How many of you have
tried putting every relevant keyword you could think of into
this tag, only to have your site continue to be nearly invisible
in the search engines? How many of you couldn't decide if you
should put commas between the keywords? Spaces? No commas? ALL
CAPS? Plurals?
What Does This
Tag Look Like?
The meta keyword
tag is usually placed beneath the title and meta description
tags in the section of your pages' HTML code, like this:
<meta http-equiv=
"Content-Language"
content="en-us">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name="GENERATOR"
content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
<meta name="ProgId"
content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<title>NewsLetter</title>
If the meta
keyword tag were a child, it would be put into a foster home due
to all the abuse it has received over the years! Once upon a
time, in the prehistoric days of the Internet (1995?), the meta
keyword tag was a great little tool for the search engines to
use to help them determine how to rank sites in their search
results. When the engines' databases were small, this was a
quick, easy method to help decide which keywords might be
important on a site.
However, as
always happens with anything this simple, people began to abuse
the tag. People (spammers) began to put keywords into the tag
that had nothing to do with the content of their site. Because
they knew lots of people were searching with the keyword "sex,"
for instance, they'd put that word in their meta keyword tag a
number of times to bring visitors to their site, even though
their site had nothing to do with sex! Personally, I don't quite
understand that logic, because it brings in untargeted visitors.
But apparently the goal was to bring in traffic, period.
Over time, less
and less weight was given to this poor, abused meta tag, and
more and more weight was given to the actual content of the
pages. Today the meta keyword tag is quietly living in its
foster home and is fairly irrelevant to getting a page ranked
high. If you were pressed for time and had to give up one meta
tag, this would be the one to give up. To be sure, some engines
still do index the words within this tag, but it appears that
they use them as a minor supplement to the text in the body and
title tags of your Web pages.
Should I Bother
With This Tag?
Since the search
engines use a wide variety of factors to determine site
rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort.
You should use everything available to you that the engines
might give some weight, and therefore you
should certainly use the meta keyword tag, along with every
other legitimate, acceptable technique available.
Article
Continues below...
|
New
Online Purchasing Now Open
|
|
|
|
Login
now. All new products for 2003 have been added to our
database.
|
|
Continued...
What Should I
Put in This Tag?
First let's recap
what needs to be done before you attempt to create a meta
keyword tag (ideally, these things should be done before the Web
site is ever created):
- Choose
your relevant keywords.
- Write the site's content based on
these keywords.
- Create a title tag using the same
keywords.
- Create a meta description tag as a
marketing sentence, also based on these keywords.
Once you do the
above things properly, putting together your meta keywords tag
is a very simple procedure.
I usually begin
by putting the keywords I used in the title of my page in the
meta keyword tag. The first words in any tag are assumed to be
given more weight, so these are most important. Then I go
through each paragraph of text on the page and take any
important phrases that might be used in the copy and paste them
into the meta keyword tag. I usually separate the phrases with a
comma and no space. After I get every important word or phrase
from the text on the page, I add some common misspellings of
some of these same words. I know for a fact that this can bring
some traffic from some engines, most notably AltaVista. Lastly,
I think of any other keywords that might describe my site that
are not currently being utilized on this particular page but
might be on another page of the site, and add these to the tag.
What About
Repetition?
Another common
abuse of the meta keyword tag was, and still is, the repetition
of words. Spammers found that if they repeated keywords enough
times in this tag, the search engines would "think" they were
relevant to the page and perhaps give it a high ranking for
those keywords. Because of this abuse, too much repetition will
now hurt you rather than help you. Never insert the same word
twice in a row in this tag, even if you're using different
variations. (Plurals, ALL CAPS, different tenses, etc.) You
can use the same word in different phrases, but
never use that word more than three or four times within the
tag, even if you're using different variations of it.
That's about all
there is to it! If everyone treated this tag with the type of
respect it deserves and only put relevant keywords into it,
perhaps we could get it out of its foster home and back to its
rightful place in the family of meta tags!
The views of our authors don' t necessarily
reflect the views and policies of this company or its
advertisers.
|
|
This is not Spam, you
are being sent this email in accordance with your basic registration
requirements. If you would like to
be removed from our mailing list, your entire account will be deleted
and no other email will be sent to you, in accordance with our terms
of service agreement you agreed to when you registered. To
unsubscribe, please reply to this email with REMOVE in the subject
heading and the registered email address in the note section..
|
