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You Are Here :: Home > Resources > Information > Searchengine > Meta_key.php
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You Are Here :: Home > Resources > Information > Searchengine > Meta_key.php |
| The
Meta Keyword Tag
If you had to give up one meta tag, the meta keyword tag would be the one to give up. 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? This tag is usually placed beneath the title and meta description tags in the <HEAD></HEAD> section of your pages' HTML code, like this: <HEAD> 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 it. 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. 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):
Once you do the above things properly, putting together your meta keywords tag is a very simple procedure. I usually begin 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! Article courtesy |
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