Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Step 4

4. Keywords and META tags exposed

As we have already discovered, your choice of keywords is fundamental to achieving ranking success. Choosing the right keywords however involves extensive market research. Find out which keywords your competitors are using and how they rank in the best search engines.

META tags are areas of text included in the header of each web page. They are used by spiders to gather information about your web site. There are many such tags, but for our purposes we’ll concentrate on the fundamentals.

- <META NAME="description">.
The ‘description’ area contains the text used by search engines to describe your site. The following guidelines may be useful when forming your description:

- <META NAME="keywords">.
The ‘keywords’ area contains all the keywords relevant to the page on which they are placed. Whilst the keywords area is still used by some search engines, its importance in terms of ranking your web site is rapidly diminishing. Some prominent engines, such as Google, do not take this tag into account at all.

Don’t include keywords just for the sake of trying to increase traffic to your site. Including the terms ‘Pamela Anderson’ or ‘free beer’ in your keyword list may increase your hit count, but is it traffic that will ultimately be of benefit to you?

A much better strategy is to liberally sprinkle your chosen keywords in the content of your site that visitors can see. A density of between 5 -15% for the keywords you want to rank highly should be sufficient. The title of your page can also be used to promote certain keywords, and is often given priority by spiders over META information.

Other tips and tricks that can be of benefit include using bold to highlight particular words, and using heading tags (from <H1> to <H3> in the HTML specification) to promote certain words.