|
Articles Index >> Marketing
How Keywords and Meta Tags Actually Work
by Michael Cheney
Meta Tags are a way for you to tell search engines what your website is about.
It used to be the case that they were very important, particularly in the likes
of Google.com and MSN.com. But increasingly, search engines are paying less
attention to Meta tags as they are open to abuse.
A Meta tag sits behind your page and allows you to tell the search engine exactly
what your website contains. But they’re open to abuse because people can
stuff them full of keywords. So more and more search engines are looking to
other sources to try and determine what a website is about. Google, for example,
no longer looks at Meta tags because they are so changeable by the webmaster.
They are still important for some search engines though.
As you have a list of keywords you don’t only put them in the Meta tags
behind the scenes. You should have keywords and key phrases on all pages of
your website.
The first step in getting traffic from search engines is to develop a list
of key phrases. You can do that by either second-guessing what you think people
might type into search engines for your product; you could ask your customers,
clients, friends or family what they think people would type in; or, more successfully,
you should use a product called WordTracker, which I highly recommend.
Once you have a list of phrases you need to pick one page on your website for
each phrase. You then assign that phrase to that one page. Ideally, you need
to be placing that phrase in the content of the page, in the actual text. You
should also place it in the Meta tags of that page so it appears in the code
behind the scenes; in the Meta tag description and the Meta tag keywords.
The other place you need to place the phrase on the page is in the page title
which appears at the very top of the page. Doing this for one phrase per page
means that page will be perfectly optimized for search engines.
A common mistake that webmasters make is to get a list of phrases and insert
them on all pages of their website, rather than targeting one phrase per page.
If all of your Meta tags are the same throughout your website or if you have,
say 100, phrases that are on all pages of your website, you won’t get
highly ranked for any of them. You will just be diluting your efforts.
Instead, what you should do is choose just one keyword or one key phrase for
each page. What you’ll then find is your site will start to climb the
search engine rankings for these particular phrases and, if you adopt this strategy,
you’ll soon see results in Google, MSN and other search engines.
Good luck with implementing your Meta tags, keywords and key phrases on your
website.
Back to top | 
