Keyword Meta Tag

The keyword Meta tag is probably the most important.  This is where you would formulate a list of words that are directly related to your website.  When someone types in a search term that fits your keywords your website could be one of the ones in the search engines listings.  Typing in a group of words in the keyword Meta tag isn’t as simple as that.  There is a methodology to generating appropriate and good keywords that are suitable for your website.  Let’s take a look at a few things to keep in mind.

1. Don’t use keywords that are not relevant to your website.  Your keywords should consist of words that specifically describe what your website is all about. So if your website is geared towards web design, you should not use keywords relative to cookbooks.  Sounds like common sense.  However, you’d be surprised at how many websites use keywords that have nothing to do with their website.

2. You want to use keywords that are found in the body of your website.  This increases the relevancy of your keywords.  This does not mean that you should have lines of keywords imbedded into your website.  Rather you should choose the words that are a part of the natural flow of your content.  With that being said, it might serve you better to write the content of your website prior to identifying the appropriate keywords.

3. Generally, there are four areas to consider when incorporating your keywords in the Meta tag and the body of your website.  These are density, frequency, prominence, and proximity. 

a. Density refers to the number of times keywords appear versus all the words within the website.  For example, if you have 500 words on a webpage and 250 are a particular keyword or keyword phase you would have a density of 50% which is way too high.  Keyword density for each keyword or phrase should typically be between 2% - 6%. 

b. Frequency refers to how often a keyword appears in the webpage.  It is believed that the more a keyword appears the more relevant search engines see your webpage for that keyword.  However, keep in mind that you do not want too high of a density.  So if you want to use the same keyword over and over again make sure to have plenty of content surrounding the keyword. 

c. Prominence refers to where the keyword(s) are found in the webpage.  To achieve this remember to use your keywords in your title, description, at the beginning of the webpage, and the beginning of sentences. 

d. Proximity refers to how close keywords are to each other.  For example, consider the following two sentences:

  “We design web sites”
  “We specialize in web design”
    If the keyword used in the search engines were “web design”, the second sentence would be a better choice as it has the keywords web and design right next to each other.

There are many free tools on the internet that you can use to determine if your Meta tags past the test.  Simply go to your favorite search engine and type in “free keyword analyzer” and see how you measure up.