Keyword selection for Meta tags and optimizing page content

We hear many opinions on the importance of keywords and search phrases, usually from people new to web design - do search engines use the Meta Keywords tag when ranking your web pages or don't they?

Research suggests that only a few search engines actually read your Keywords Tag these days when spidering your pages and one of them is NOT Google!

That said it seems you can still be penalized 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 and others? 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 Google is concerned, our strategy is always to play it safe. Most of us must overcome the fear of 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!

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.