Choosing
your Meta-Keywords
by Alan Cole
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Introduction
This article assumes you already know what
a 'meta-tag keyword' is and know a
little about their importance to search engines. In this article I will attempt
to explain the art of choosing the most appropriate and best performing keywords
for your web pages.
As you should already know keywords contained within your websites' meta
tags are extremely important in allowing search engines to determine the
content of
your web pages. In order to make sure that these keywords are bringing your
site up within Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) and driving visitors to
your site,
the most important factors in determining your keywords are:
- Relevance.
- Choosing keywords that people actually search for.
- Choosing keywords without too much competition.
Relevance
All your keywords should ALWAYS be relevant to the content within the page
they describe. Adding keywords to your site just because they are commonly
searched
for words is not recommended. Not only will it frustrate visitors who are looking
for other information, but it may well get your site black-listed from search
engine rankings. Highly relevant keywords will attract visitors who are actually
interested in the products and services your website offers. At the end of
the day, it is better to attract fewer visitors who actually have an interest
in
your website than it is to attract more visitors who leave immediately.
Choosing keywords people search for
Although your keywords should all be relevant, sometimes it is best not to
be too specific. For example, I once discovered a new fossil (honest!), it
was new
to science so I named it, wrote a paper on it and had it published. I didn't
ever build a web page dedicated to it, but if I had the most used keyword and
most relevant word would have been the fossils name (Trypanites fosteryeomani).
You might therefore think that it would be sensible to use this as one of my
most important keywords. However, that would (at least to start with) have been
wrong. No one else has ever heard of this fossil, so it is very unlikely that
anyone would ever type its name into a search engine. And sure enough, a quick
check shows that during Dec 2004 there wasn't a single search for this term
within a particular, popular search engine.
I would therefore need to be more generic with my choice of keywords. The
fossil itself was a trace fossil of a worm from the Jurassic, so keywords/phrases
such as 'fossil', 'trace fossil' or 'worm trace fossil' may be more successful.
There are several tools available that allow you to check the number of times
a particular word or phrase has been searched for. It is important to choose
keywords that are regularly searched for and these tools can help in this decision.
It is also worth including common mis-spellings of your most relevant keywords
as your competitors may not have thought of this when choosing their keywords.
Choosing keywords without too much competition
The section above may lead you to believe that choosing very generic keywords
is your best bet as they are often searched for. However, if you get too generic
in your choice of keywords then you will be competing with many more websites
for the top spots in the SERPS. If we go back to our fossil example we can
see what I mean. A quick search in Google brings up the following numbers of
results:
- Trypanites fosteryeomani - 1 result (something I once wrote in a forum!)
- Jurassic Worm Trace Fossil - 4,320 results
- Trace Fossil - 407,000 results
- Fossil - 9,120,000 results
As you would expect, the more generic we get, the more results we get. It can
be seen then that choosing the best keywords is a matter of balancing the number
of times the keywords are searched for against the number of other sites competing
for rankings with those keywords. The best keywords will be those that are
searched for often but have few competing sites (assuming the keywords are
relevant to
your content).
I find that it is best to have a balance between the generic and specific keywords
relating to your web page and using key-phrases is a useful way of achieving
this. In this way the entire key-phrase can be specific to your particular
page, but the individual words within it are fairly generic.
e.g. Affordable Website Design Wales (4 generic keywords to create a specific
key-phrase)
To Summarise, choosing keywords is an essential part of producing a successful
website. Your keywords need to be highly relevant to the content of your page
and specific enough to reduce competition. They also need to contain some generic
keywords that are often searched for. As always, the single most important
factor is relevancy and good content to go with the keywords.
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Alan Cole runs Pixelwave Design,
a one-person web design studio. His aim is
to provide cost effective website design
production
and maintenance by offering professional web solutions that stand out from
the crowd.
Pixelwave Design specialise in accessible, conformable search engine friendly
website.
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