Keywords

Keywords should be in two places; in the header part of your page, which no one sees, and then throughout your website, but most specifically on your main page. Let's take this one at a time.

In the header part of your page coding, underneath the title, there are two categories and one should probably have. The first is a meta tag known as "description", which allows you to write up to a 250 character description of what your business does. The second is a meta tag known as "keywords", and in here is where you put terms that you hope people will find you by when they do searches. The general rule of thumb is that you should keep that to around 250 characters also, but I've noticed you won't get penalized if you're a little bit over that. As a point of clarification, characters also include spaces, so if you're not sure on the count I suggest you create or paste your phrase into something like Microsoft Word, do tools, then word count; it'll tell you both how many words and how many characters you have.

There is one major rule here and one point of contention. The major rule is to not stuff words into the keywords area over and over. For instance, if you sell toys, don't do this: toys, toys, toys, toys, toys, toys, toys, toys, toys,… you catch my drift here. This will get your page ignored. Also, don't use one word more than four times if you can possibly help it, no matter how many ways you can use it, to whit: toys, red toys, blue toys, big toys, small toys, American toys, lazy toys, educational toys,… and so on. After you've already used a certain word a number of times, the search engines are smart enough to recognize it's importance to what you do, and you can then spend your time looking for other phrases that you want to highlight.

The point of contention is whether one should separate search terms by commas or not. It seems to be split down the middle in my research. I sit on the side that says split them up. If you can key on certain terms that you know and hope people will use in looking for your products or services, it just makes your life much easier.

One final thing. In 2006, Google changed up how they look at keywords. More specifically, they've stopped looking at keywords in meta tags unless they have nothing else to look at on your pages. We'll be talking about content in more detail later on. However, there are still other search engines that look at meta tags, and since Google isn't the only search engine in the world, it still is in your best interest to put them in your meta tags.

Next comes the keywords people see, which need to be on your main page. The way the ranking services see things, if what you say you do is so important, it should be on your page also. I've seen many pages where someone has keywords within their header, yet you get to their page and there's nothing there to indicate what they do. Keywords should be prominent, used early, hopefully often enough to bring the point home, but not used out of context. If possible, try to use some of the same phrases you use in the keywords that are unseen, and highlight them. The percentage of your keywords that come up per the number of words you have in your content is known is keyword density.

If you have a page where the only word is "toys" in many different combinations, your page will eventually be unlisted on the search engines. Both here and in the header, this is known as keyword stuffing, and it'll get you nowhere. As a rule, try not to use a particular term more than 5 times. Yeah, that's sometimes difficult to do, but just be as cautious as you can.

This means that your initial page should have some nice copy about what you do, hopefully at least three or four paragraphs or lists of what you do. You don't want to give it all away on the first page, but you do want to tell the world immediately what it is you do. If you're going to spend any real time on a page, this one is most crucial to your online success.

One more thing you can do is put what's known as alt tags into any images you have on your page. Basically, it gives you the opportunity to have another place to put keywords to show people what it is you do. For a more practical reason, sometimes pictures don't come through on some browsers for whatever reason, and having those descriptions helps more people know what it is you do. The downside of this is that it's being used by more and more spammers these days to get their emails through your spam filters, but email spam is a lesson for someone else to tackle. If you have menu items, like mine on the side, it's best to use alt tags that say what they are, but for any other images, it could add up, especially if your page was created with an image background that was broken up into multiple pieces.

If you want to jump around, here's the table of contents:

© SEO Xcellence, 2007