Website
Design and Promotion Services
Keyword
selection
We hear many
opinions on keywords and search phrases - do search engines use the Meta
Keywords tag when ranking your web pages or don't they?
Research
suggests that only two search engines actually read your Keywords Tag when
spidering your pages - AltaVista and InfoSeek, the rest simply ignore
them. The plot thickens at this point as AltaVista can penalize you for an
improperly constructed, or 'worded' keywords Tag. As a basic guideline the
keywords tag should only be used to offer the search engine synonyms,
plural/singular and upper/lower case variations on words that actually
appear on the page. On the other hand, some Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
companies fill their keywords tags with words that are not synonymous with
those that appear on the page. Their strategy appears to go un-penalized
by AltaVista? So what's the answer? - well tread carefully is our advice.
Try to use words that do appear on the page or are at least related by
subject/topic to the theme of your site. As always, list your most
important words earliest in the tag and try to combine words into your
most common and relevant search phrases. You could also try using a string
of words without punctuation. This will force the search engine to
consider word strings within the list of words as independent search
terms.
As far as
InfoSeek are concerned, again play it safe. You might run some basic tests
and construct pages without a Meta Keywords tag and see if your search
rankings are negatively influenced by this strategy. We have a number of
pages that presently rank well on AltaVista that do not use a Meta
Keywords tag, though we have insufficient data presently to favor one
method over the other.
Most of us
must overcome a 'mental obstacle' by removing the tag completely. Many
webmasters are preoccupied with the 'Keywords' tag as the 'bringer of high
rankings', believing that entering words within the keywords tag will
guarantee good search listings against those particular search words. This
had some relevance 2/3 years ago but certainly not any more. As stated
above, the majority of search engines do not even read the Keywords tag,
which in our opinion levels the playing field, throwing the emphasis back
on 'web copy' rather than 'hidden' Meta tags.
If you are a
'die hard' and you cannot bring yourself to remove the precious keywords
tag then try the following strategy to help you select words and phrases
that should be listed in the tag:
Copy all the
text from your web page into a text editor like MS Word for example. Then
strip out all generic words like a, if, an, but. Then strip out any minor
words that do not form part of a search phrase. For example, if your site
is about Turkish Vacations and you have a phrase on your page thus:
"visit us for hot beach vacations in Turkey", then you might
strip out the words us, for, in but leave words visit, hot, beach - as
these could be 'key' words considered by the search engines when analyzing
a particular search phrase.
You then have
a page with perhaps two thirds of the words removed. Now list the
remaining words in order of priority on the page. To determine the words
and search phrases that are 'priority', you will need to do some basic
research into the keyword phrases that people are using to find your
services. "Turkish vacations" for example, might be one of the
most popular search phrases used by people looking specifically for
vacations in Turkey. When you look at the list, if there are any obvious
and important phrases/words missing, then go back to your HTML page and
add them into the page text, as structured sentences that fit
grammatically within the context of the remainder of the page. Then add
the phrases/words wherever you think they fit into the prioritized list of
keyword phrases you have generated, and you have the content of your
keywords Tag. Add several synonyms if you have room in the tag, keeping
within around 700 characters total. Again if you use MS Word, character
counts are displayed via an option on the tool bar, so you don't have to
count them yourself!
Once you have
submitted the page, monitor it closely. You should see results back fairly
quickly from some of the engines. The latest site that we submitted
(manually) pulled in results from AltaVista, HotBot and
Google within 10
days, though this is rare. If your page is listed way down the pile, then
go back into the page and make some revisions. A good strategy to organize
this and monitor the effectiveness is as follows:
You created a
prioritized list of search words/phrases when you created the Meta
Keywords tag on the page. Go to one of the search engines where you know
for certain that the page in question has been indexed. Then, using the
list of search phrases that you created, enter each, one at a time and
record the page ranking for that particular search term. You can do this
very easily and quickly if you have invested in software like Web Pos Gold
for example. Lets say that you had ten search terms to start out with.
Hopefully your most important search term will have resulted in the
highest ranking, but in practice it quite probably will not. Create a
simple 'matrix' if it helps, showing the preferred order of ranking and
the actual order of ranking for each search phrase. Then simply transpose
the words so that the important words/phrases appear in the exact
positions of the highest ranking words/phrases, and viola! You can see
that the page may no longer be grammatically correct, but you should be
able to reword it and keep your important words 'locked' in their
respective positions on the page. Resubmit and run the same test again.
Knowing where the search engines 'like to find' your important
phrases/words will give you great insight for future page designs. Many
people will tell you that keyword prominence is most important, but you
will probably find that most search engines do not favor sites that show
100% keyword prominence in key areas of the page. You now have a 'model'
for your chosen search engine which you can fine tune. Compare what you
have with a site that is listed near the top of the returned searches
against your important search phrase. Check firstly their keyword
frequency on the page (Search engines monitor keyword frequency and may
penalize you if you use the same word too often). Now if you find that
your competitor site has more keywords than yours does, add keywords to
your page in roughly the same areas as your competitors page, trying to
preserve the position of your 'locked in' words. You get the idea. It is
all a little 'trial and error' but within a relatively short time you will
have a good measure of how it all works. What you are actually doing is
trying to pin-point the function of the algorithm that the search engine
uses to rank your page. You will never lock on to the search engine
algorithm exactly however. Even if you hit a #1 ranking on a specific page
you will find it difficult to repeat that top spot listing on other pages
for other keywords, but you could get pretty close and that is what
counts.
Consider
another angle on keyword optimization. Is it better to have a #1 listing
on a search phrase that brings in maybe 50 hits per day, or is it better
to have 10 #20 listings that each bring in 10 hits per day? In most cases
you would agree that 100 hits is better than 50 hits, right? The point is
that you should try to diversify your optimization and search term
selection as much as possible. Don't misunderstand me here. It is
important to keep the diversification within the overall theme of the
site. So using the term "search engine ranking" throughout this
site would yield resultant traffic figures lower than had we diversified
and targeted "search engine positioning" "search engine
placement" "search engine listing" etc. The words 'ranking'
'positioning' 'listing' and 'placement', all sit well within the theme of
the site. It is important to keep to a theme, more so now that search
engines are moving toward 'theme' based ranking algorithms to help rank
sites within their databases.
See our notes
on theme based ranking for a better
understanding of this topic.
For a
complete resource/guide on how to improve your
search engine rankings
