Choosing your Meta-Keywords

Choosing your Meta-Keywords
By Alan Cole

Introduction

This article assumes you already know what a ‘meta-tag keyword’
is and know a little about their importance to search engines.
In this article I will attempt to explain the art of choosing
the most appropriate and best performing keywords for your web
pages.

As you should already know keywords contained within your
websites’ meta tags are extremely important in allowing search
engines to determine the content of your web pages. In order
to make sure that these keywords are bringing your site up
within Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) and driving
visitors to your site, the most important factors in
determining your keywords are: Relevance. Choosing keywords
that people actually search for. Choosing keywords without too
much competition.

Relevance

All your keywords should ALWAYS be relevant to the content
within the page they describe. Adding keywords to your site
just because they are commonly searched for words is not
recommended. Not only will it frustrate visitors who are
looking for other information, but it may well get your site
black-listed from search engine rankings.

Highly relevant keywords will attract visitors who are actually
interested in the products and services your website offers.
At the end of the day, it is better to attract fewer visitors
who actually have an interest in your website than it is to
attract more visitors who leave immediately.

Choosing Keywords people search for

Although your keywords should all be relevant, sometimes it is
best not to be too specific.

For example, I once discovered a new fossil (honest!), it was
new to science so I named it, wrote a paper on it and had it
published. I didn’t ever build a web page dedicated to it, but
if I had the most used keyword and most relevant word would
have been the fossils name (Trypanites fosteryeomani). You
might therefore think that it would be sensible to use this as
one of my most important keywords… However, that would (at
least to start with) have been wrong. No one else has ever
heard of this fossil, so it is very unlikely that anyone would
ever type its name into a search engine. And sure enough, a
quick check shows that during Dec 2004 there wasn’t a single
search for this term within a particular, popular search engine.

I would therefore need to be more generic with my choice of
keywords. The fossil itself was a trace fossil of a worm from
the Jurassic, so keywords/phrases such as ‘fossil’, ‘trace
fossil’ or ‘worm trace fossil’ may be more successful.

There are several tools available that allow you to check the
number of times a particular word or phrase has been searched
for. It is important to choose keywords that are regularly
searched for and these tools can help in this decision. It is
also worth including common mis-spellings of your most
relevant keywords as your competitors may not have thought of
this when choosing their keywords.

Choosing keywords without too much competition

The section above may lead you to believe that choosing very
generic keywords is your best bet as they are often searched
for. However, if you get too generic in your choice of
keywords then you will be competing with many more websites
for the top spots in the SERPS. If we go back to our fossil
example we can see what I mean. A quick search in Google
brings up the following numbers of results: Trypanites
fosteryeomani – 1 result (something I once wrote in a forum!
) Jurassic Worm Trace Fossil – 4,320 results Trace Fossil –
407,000 results Fossil – 9,120,000 results

As you would expect, the more generic we get, the more results
we get. It can be seen then that choosing the best keywords is
a matter of balancing the number of times the keywords are
searched for against the number of other sites competing for
rankings with those keywords. The best keywords will be those
that are searched for often but have few competing sites
(assuming the keywords are relevant to your content).

I find that it is best to have a balance between the generic
and specific keywords relating to your web page and using key-
phrases is a useful way of achieving this. In this way the
entire key-phrase can be specific to your particular page, but
the individual words within it are fairly generic.

e.g. Affordable Website Design Wales (4 generic keywords to
create a specific key-phrase)

To Summarise, choosing keywords is an essential part of
producing a successful website. Your keywords need to be
highly relevant to the content of your page and specific
enough to reduce competition. They also need to contain some
generic keywords that are often searched for. As always, the
single most important factor is relevancy and good content to
go with the keywords.

Jhonny Papas is the co-author of http://www.Traffic-Engine.NET
(http://www.Traffic-Engine.NET) and eCommerce Analyst.