SEO – Keywords and Meta Tags

Google no longer requires keywords or meta tags but other search engines still use them so they’re useful to have. Google scans the content that is on all pages of your site instead. If you have your relevant words in images and such google won’t be able to read these and it will be detrimental to your rating. It’s therefore worthwhile to use text for these where possible.

Keywords definitely have value, but they can also damage your website’s reputation if not used correctly.

Things to consider when choosing Keywords or ‘trophy words’:

Mike Monahan’s book lists the following for relevance of keywords in various places (this is for 2011). He says that there is a more noticeable impact if we use keywords in different places of the website to make the word density higher and the website seem more relevant to search engines. This list is a chart he has put together to show how much of an impact on relevancy placing keywords in a website can be.

1. Keyword int he Title Tag (6%)
2. Keyword as the first word(s) of the Title Tag (6%)
3. Keyword in the Root Domain Name (eg. keyword.com) (6%)
4. Keyword in the H1 Headline Tag (5%)
5. Keyword in the Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page (4%)
6. Keyword in the External Link Anchor Text on the Page (4%)
7. Keyword in the H1 tag (4%)
8. Keyword in the first 100 words in HTML on the Page (4%)
9. Keyword in your domain name (7%)
10. Keyword in a subdomain (4%)
11. Keyword in the page name URL (www.example.com/3D-modelling.html) (3%)
12. Keyword in other H Tags (3%)
13. Keyword in image ALT text (3%)
14. Keyword repeating in HTML Text ont he page (3%)
15. Keyword in image names on the page (keyword.jpg) (3%)
16. Keyword in <b> or <strong> tags (2%)
17. Keyword in teh Meta Description Tag (2%)
18. Keyword in comment tags in the HTML (1%)
19. Keyword in the Meta tagging (5%).

Long Tail Keywords

Long Tail keywords are keyword phrases that have at least two and up to as many as five words in a phrase.  These keywords are less expensive when using pay-per-click viewing as they target searchers who are looking for something very specific meaning that you get fewer hits from them but the hits you do get are of higher quality as they are looking exactly for what you are offering on your page.

An example might be 3D Modellers Brisbane. This makes my site more relevant and specific to the searcher as it narrows down what they are searching for. To use long tail keywords properly the creator needs to know which long tail keywords actually get hits or are searched for in major search engines. Using something like Google Adwords can be helpful here as well as good old fashioned Research.

Keyword Stuffing

You do not want to jam every keyword and combination of keywords into your website. Generally it’s best to stick to 6-8 keywords and concentrate on those. Things that need to be considered most are what sort of competition is out there for the same keywords. If there is a lot, it can sometimes be better to instead find some words that are still very relevant but not quite as compeditive.

An example might be the keyword ‘brisbane pet stores’. This might be searched on 2000 times a month in brisbane but there are 100 other pet stores competeing for the same keyword. If say instead we used “tropical fish brisbane” there might only be 20 or so.

Trophy Keywords

Pick only 1-3 keywords per page as your trophy keywords if you are optimizing for Google. Any more and Google will probably just find you aren’t relevant for any. This example is again straight from Mike Monahan’s book – Search Engine Optimization Secrets: SEO for 2011:

Lets say you have a website that reveiws films and rates them. If one of your keywords is ‘films, that is too broad. Do you sell films? Do you develop them? Do you make them? Do you have celaning producs to clean films? No. You have to make your keywords more relevant. Now if one of the keywords in the Meta tagging was ‘feature film critic’ or ‘feature film reviews’ that would be more relevant.

Notice that a keyword is more like a key phrase than a word. You can ‘stuff’ keywords by being too broad on your Meta keywords and by having way more than three making Google find you relevant for nothing. Another way is using the the keywords too many times in your content, called spamming. Doing something like banging 200 of the same word at the bottom of the homepage can get you banned from most search engines.

More on Keywords

The best way to go about deciding on keywords is to try and think from an outsiders point of view. If I wanted to buy some fish to put in my fish tank from a nearby pet shop, how would I find that information? I’d probably go to google and type in ‘tropical fish shops brisbane’.  Knowing this, I can now try and find out how many other people are using my desired keywords to see what my competition is like and from there refine them until I have a good chance of working my site to the first page. Best way to go here is to go to https://adwords.google.com and use Google Adwords. More about Google Adwords in another post though.