| USING
KEYWORDS TO YOUR OWN ADVANTAGE
Now that you have done
your "keyword" homework, let's discuss how to use keywords to
your advantage.
We'll start with the
most obvious, the META tag strategy. Several search engines (InfoSeek,
HotBot, and AltaVista) use META tags, the DESCRIPTION tag and the KEYWORD
tag specifically, to index pages and return results for searchers.
It's important to
follow certain guidelines and principles to be sure your page is spidered
and that the engine doesn't filter your page out of its index due to
KEYWORD overuse.
First, tag placement on
the page is very important. I use Microsoft FrontPage97 for my site, and
have found a rather disconcerting feature-it puts my tags in the wrong
spot. If you are using any HTML editor other than something like Notepad,
check your tag placement!
Here's how it needs to
look, with the tags in the order they should appear:
<html>
<head>
<!--NOEDIT-->
<title>Descriptive Page Title Which Includes Keywords</title>
<meta name="DESCRIPTION"
content="description of the page (using keywords) that will appear in
the search results when people find the page through a search engine
that uses this META tag">
<meta name="KEYWORDS"
content="the,very,important,keywords,
separated,by,commas,no,spaces,in,order,of,importance">
<!--/NOEDIT-->
</head>
Several search engines
(Lycos, HotBot, Excite, and AltaVista)will spider your page when you
submit it, then will EVENTUALLY go back to your site and investigate all
of your links so they can index your whole site. Do you have your KEYWORDS
and DESCRIPTION tags on each page? Don't limit your exposure to your home
page alone. Include the tags on every page, making them relevant to the
content of the page.
Follow the guidelines
the search engines themselves set forth for the KEYWORD tag:
(1) Limit the
character counts of your KEYWORDS tag to 1,000 to fall within Infoseek's
and AltaVista's guidelines. Separate your KEYWORDS with commas, no need to
use spaces (they count as characters), and place them within the tag in
order of importance.
(2) Don't repeat
a KEYWORD within a tag more than seven times (this number is only a
guideline), and then, this repetition should be used only in phrases, for
example: "garden, garden plants, garden seeds, garden-etc." NOT
like: "garden,garden,garden,garden," Just use common sense here
- if you're trying to "cheat", keep in mind that the search
engine will probably figure that out. Keyword repetition might work for
some for awhile, but most (if not all) the engines are penalizing for
excessive repetition-why take a chance that your page will be dropped
completely?
KEYWORDS HERE,
KEYWORDS THERE, USE YOUR KEYWORDS EVERYWHERE!
Let's take a look at
the importance of using your keywords throughout your web pages.
Alta Vista uses the
META tags, but it also ranks relevency based on word frequency of the
first text it finds. What is the first text it will find? Your page title.
So, don't you think you'll get better results if your page is all about
Tupperware if you use that term in your page title? For example, instead
of "KITCHEN ACCESSORIES" for a page title, "TUPPERWARE -
TUPPERWARE FOR THE KITCHEN" or "TUPPERWARE KITCHEN
ACCESSORIES" would give you much better results. WebCrawler uses META
tags, but it puts MORE emphasis on your page title than on META tags. Web
Crawler also rates how many times the search terms occur in the document.
With all the search engines, actually, the page title is an important
feature.
Using your keywords in
your content is another very important strategy. And in most cases, the
text closest to the top of the page is the most important. If you can add
some descriptive text using key words at the top of the page without
totally destroying your design, then do it.
Lycos and Excite don't
use META tags--they index all the text on your page, so you want to be
sure that you use your most important keywords in your content. What is
your content? Of course, you know it is the text on your page. This text
also includes page headings (or should). Some of the search engines seem
to pay more attention to the page headings than regular text, so you'll
want to take advantage of this. **Page headings are the HTML that make
your text bigger and bolder, and are used as a brief description before a
series of paragraphs.** <h1></h1> will make the heading very
large, but you can always go down to <h6></h6> and use this
keyword strategy. (The larger the heading, however, the better.) You can
use your imagination a little bit in using this heading feature with your
keywords--for example, <h6> and <strong> or <b> look a
lot alike!
Another spot you can
use your keywords is in the <alt> tag for images. If the first item
on your page is your banner, you can use this <alt> tag to add some
descriptive phrasing using your keywords. This also makes life more
interesting for people as they are waiting for the image to load. And
here's another little tip: your filenames--a search engine that uses
keyword frequency to rank search results will give your page more weight
if your file name is www.yoursite.com/tupperware.html than if it is named
www.somesite.com/~myhome.html.
You can see now that
using your keywords throughout your web site is an important search engine
strategy. It can be a challenge to accomplish this without the text
becoming monotonous, but it's worth the work. |
