~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~
From: Peter Thorpe
When placing keywords behind a page the protocol seems to be one word
or a two word phrase however, I have seen sites where they have used 3
words in a phrase i.e., houses for sale. What is the right procedure?
Also I've read recently that if you eliminate commas altogether and
just have your keywords in one long sentence, this can enhance your
chances. What can you tell me about this?
Peter from down under
Not just on the net - we are the net
http://www.thenet.com.au
website design and online marketing that really works
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Hey Peter,
When deciding upon what keyword phrases to use in an optimization, we
usually shoot for 2- and 3-word phrases. One-word keywords are
usually too general, as we've discussed here many times before.
There's not much difference in using 2-word or 3-word phrases. If
"houses for sale" is relevant to your site, and is shown to be a
phrase that people actually search for in the engines, then of course
you should write your visible text copy and behind the scenes tags
based on that 3-word phrase. Some engines do apparently ignore
certain "stop" words, which are very common words, such as "the" and
"a" etc. It may very well be that "for" could be a stop word,
however, it also wouldn't make sense to optimize for "houses sale" if
you actually want to rank high with "houses for sale," in my opinion.
As to your question about eliminating commas in the meta keyword tag,
the answer seems to be to do whatever works best for you and your
site. This tag gets so little weight these days anyway. Whether or
not commas are used seems to make so little difference one way or the
other in rankings. I personally use a combination in my meta keyword
tags. I put a particular string of words without any commas, and also
put some phrases and/or words separated by commas. Again, it really
doesn't matter. From what I understand, most of the engines simply
ignore the comma anyway and treat them as a space. For more
information on my feelings regarding the meta keyword tag, please read
my article at: http://www.rankwrite.com/metakeyword.htm.
- Jill
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