Keywords, Title, and Description
March 15, 2006 - 12:15pm — Christina Evans
What is the importance of keywords in your meta tags? I heard that just putting hundreds of keywords is actually bad. What is keyword density? Why is it important? Does it matter what I put in as a description? Should I just copy and paste my keywords? Could you explain these things a little more?
Keywords
Christina,
Q. What is the importance of keywords in your meta tags?
A. To answer this lets first answer what a meta tag is and is not.
A meta tag is an HTML tag that must appear in the <head> portion of the page. Meta tags supply information about a page but do not affect its appearance.
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Webwise on solutions</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Everything you want to know about SEO, Search Engine Optimization and online communities.">
<META name="keywords" content="Search Engine Optimization, SEO, OSN, Online communities.">
</HEAD>
The Title tag is not a meta tag, but is important regardless. The actual keyword tag has also become relatively obsolete for most of the major search engines due to abuse by tag spamming.
The importance of keywords in these tags is to tell the search engine what your site is about. Using your meta tags for SEO is an important tool for your websites overall success. You should also remember that meta tags will not be an answer for a website’s poor performance in the search engine.
Q. I heard that just putting hundreds of keywords is actually bad.
A. This is know as “Keyword Stuffing†or “Tag Spam†Doing this may result in your site getting banned from certain search engine’s. Most search engine’s have spam filters that allow them to actively remove the sites that are doing this from their databases.
Q. What is keyword density?
A. Keyword density is one of the elements of good keyword optimization. Definitively it is the number of times that a keyword is used on a web page divided by the total number of words on that page. The best % of keyword density differs from engine to engine. I would generally recommend having a keyword density of 5-8%
Q. Why is it important?
A. There a two frames of thought on this. The first is that Keyword density is not important (I disagree) And the second is that it is important because the search engine’s place a higher search result for a page that has a higher keyword density. A search engine’s main priority is to bring the customer results that match what they have asked for. A well-written keyword dense page is exactly what a search engine needs to do this.
Q. Does it matter what I put in as a description?
A. Yes. This tag is used for that little snippet that you see after the title when you search for a topic in a search engine. For example, this is one of the results that I found in Google when I searched for Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engine Optimization Tips
The web's most popular search engine marketing service. Submit It's software
checks the optimization of your site prior to submission to ensure your ...
www.submit-it.com/subopt.htm - 14k - Cached - Similar pages
Q. Should I just copy and paste my keywords?
A. No. Though meta tags are not as important as they once were, you should spend time deciding what keywords you are going to use in them. They can be used as a very effective tool for your SEO.
Q. Could you explain these things a little more?
A. No. Actually, Yes I can. In my next blog, “Placement of keywords†I will explain the What, Why and Where of keyword placement.
(I will be ADDing pictures for those of us who have a short attention span)
If you have further questions, you can reply to this forum.
Thank you
Brett Morris
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