Choosing effective keywords for your website27 October 2005
Keywords, or key phrases, are words that describe the content of your web pages, and are one of the ways in which search engines decide how high your web page should be ranked in their search results. If you run an e-commerce website selling jewellery, for example, your keywords might be 'earrings', 'pendants' or some of the brand names you sell.
Businesses use keywords to improve their search engine page ranking (and hence visitor numbers) in two ways. Firstly, as meta tags hidden from view in the HTML code, and secondly, within the text of the web page.
Getting started
Choosing keywords is not necessarily easy. For one thing, it can be difficult deciding what your web page is about, but most importantly, the effective use of keywords is highly competitive. For example, a reseller of Microsoft's software would have great difficulty achieving a high ranking with the keywords 'Microsoft' and 'software' because so many businesses have already worked hard to ensure they appear high in the rankings for those words.
It's important to keep up with the latest development in search engine optimisation, and the best way to do that is to monitor the specialised news sites and forums. The Search Engine Journal is a useful place for news, and SEO Chat is a good example of a typical discussion forum on this subject. You can also find tips about using search engines effectively at the SearchEngineWatch portal.
With this in mind, businesses seeking to optimise their websites using keywords should consider the following points:
- None of the major search engines pay much attention to the keywords found in meta tags as part of the HTML code for a web page. It is generally thought that Google, which accounts for a large majority of searches, ignores them altogether. Consequently it's much more rewarding to concentrate on using relevant keywords in the text your visitors read when they arrive on your site.
- Important keywords should be higher up in the page. Use them often, but not too often to make the text read awkwardly. 'Keyword-stuffing' may eventually get you banned from some search engines.
- Avoid trying to achieve too much: concentrate on optimising each web page individually using a small number of keywords rather than trying to capture the attention of people searching for a wide range of keywords.
- A word-frequency counter can give you a fresh - and sometimes surprising - perspective on the most common words on your page. Copy and paste your text into the form at this tool to get an ordered list.
- Avoid trying to trick the search engines with underhand tactics. Making keywords the same colour as the background, or creating pages which are logged by search engines but divert ordinary visitors to a different page, may work for a few weeks, but you may be demoted in the rankings or even banned from the search engines if you are found out.
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