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If you had to give up one meta tag, the meta keyword tag would be the one to give up.
By Jill Whalen
Now that we've covered the all-important title
tag and meta description tag, it's time to
move on to the very misunderstood and
abused meta keyword tag.
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>
<TITLE>your DESCRIPTIVE KEYWORDS title goes here
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Your keyword rich
marketing sales-pitch meta description goes here">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="your keywords,go
here,separated by a comma,but not a space">
</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 the tag. 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):
- Choose your relevant keywords.
- Write the site's content based on these keywords.
- Create a title tag using the same keywords.
- Create a meta description tag as a marketing sentence, also
- based on these keywords.
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!
Please send me any questions about this, and we can answer them in the RankWrite Roundable newsletter. You can e-mail me at
jill@rankwrite.com with your questions or column ideas.
© Jill Whalen. dba Whalen's Web Whiz. All rights reserved. Do not
duplicate or redistribute in any form.
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