Keywords And Their Proper Use
A keyword is typically phrase a few words long, which indicates the type of information that appears on the web page. This allows web crawlers to correctly index your web page. The success of your website is highly contingent on your ability to properly choose and place critical keywords.
The top section of your page contains a place for “Meta tags”. A synopsis of the contents of your page is made available to search engine crawlers by certain meta tags. Meta tags have limited space. Articles like “a,” “an” or “the,” conjunctions and other unimportant words should not be part of keywords. Use nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs as much as possible.
The Keyword Meta tag: Most meta tags are designed as a place to insert keywords and other information to index your site properly. People, however, abused this by “keyword stuffing” (inserting a lot of repetitive, irrelevant keywords into meta tags so a search spider would rank their site close to the top). Your site will be penalized for keyword stuffing as search engines have learned about this method. Rumor has it that Google no longer utilizes keyword meta tags. It doesn’t hurt for you to have a good keyword meta tag, just in case, especially since Google is just one of many search engines.
Keywords should also be placed in the Title Tag: To search engine bots, keywords in one’s title are very important. Your title is what appears in the top bar of people’s web browsers. Be brief, place the keywords up-front as much as possible. Grammar and syntax are less important due to extremely limited space (Usually, fewer than 50 characters should be used).
The Description Tag: A description tag should also be in the head section of your web page. Your description should be rich in keywords, but it should read naturally and have correct spelling and grammar.
The H1 and H2 tags: These are used heavily by the search engine spiders. They are like section breaks or titles (but not to be confused with the title tag).
Comments in Images: Spiders cannot interpret images, but they can detect the “alt” text in your image tag. That makes this area ideal for keyword placement.
The Page’s Body: Lastly, the page must make sense. The keywords in your meta, H1, H2, and description tags should be consistent with those in your site body. Place the bulk of the keywords in the top two-thirds of the main text. Keep in mind, though, that crawlers understand syntax; keywords that are just shoehorned in will make your site look bad and your page rank suffer.
Originally posted 2009-07-18 06:05:39.