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Can_Meta_tags_such_as_the_keyword_tag_bring_high_rankings_to_my_site
| Can Meta tags such as the keyword tag bring high rankings to my site?
If you had to give up one meta tag, the meta keyword tag would
be the one to give up. Now that we've covered the all-important
title tag and meta description tag, it's time to move on to the
very misunderstood and abused meta tag, the meta keyword tag.
Everyone knows that to obtain high search engine rankings all
you have to do is put the keywords that you want to rank high
with into your meta tags, right? Not even close! certainly be
out of work. How many of you reading this column have obsessed
over meta tags such as the keyword tag? How many of you have
tried putting every relevant keyword you could think of into
this meta tag, only to have your site continue to be nearly
invisible in the search engines? How many of you couldn't decide
if you should put commas between the keywords? Spaces? No
commas? ALL CAPS? Plurals? What Does This Meta Tag Look Like?
This meta tag is usually placed beneath the title and meta
description tags in the section of your pages'
HTML code, like this: your DESCRIPTIVE KEYWORDS
title goes here
If this meta tag were a
child, it would be put into a foster home due to all the abuse
it has received over the years! Once upon a time, in the
prehistoric days of the Internet (1995?), meta keyword tags were
a great little tool for the search engines to use to help them
determine how to rank sites in their search results. When the
engines' databases were small, this meta tag was a quick, easy
method to help decide which keywords might be important on a
site. However, as always happens with anything this simple,
people began to abuse it. People (spammers) began to put
keywords into the meta tag that had nothing to do with the
content of their site. Because they knew lots of people were
searching with the keyword "sex," for instance, they'd put that
word in their meta tags a number of times to bring visitors to
their site, even though their site had nothing to do with sex!
Personally, I don't quite understand that logic, because it
brings in untargeted visitors But apparently the goal was to
bring in traffic, period. Over time, less and less weight was
given to poor abused meta tags, and more and more weight was
given to the actual content of the pages. Today the meta keyword
tag is quietly living in its foster home and is fairly
irrelevant to getting a page ranked high. If you were pressed
for time and had to give up one meta tag, this would be the one
to give up. To be sure, some engines still do index the words
within these meta tags, but it appears that they use them as a
minor supplement to the text in the body copy and title tags of
your Web pages. Should I Bother With Meta Keyword Tags? Since
the search engines use a wide variety of factors to determine
site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative
effort. You should use everything available to you that the
engines might give some weight, and therefore you should
certainly use meta tags (including the meta keyword tag), along
with every other legitimate, acceptable technique available. At
best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that
still read them. At worst, it won't hurt your rankings (unless
you brazenly keyword stuff them). I still use these meta tags on
clients' Web sites, but don't bother with them on my own sites.
What Should I Put in these Meta Tags? First let's recap what
needs to be done before you attempt to create meta keyword tags
(ideally these things should be done before the Web site is ever
created):
Choose your relevant keywords. Write the site's content based on
these keywords. Create a title tag using the same keywords.
Create a meta description tag as a marketing sentence, also
based on these keywords. Once you do the above things properly,
putting together your meta keyword tag is a very simple
procedure. I usually begin putting the keywords I used in the
title of my page in the meta keyword tag. The first words in any
tag are assumed to be given more weight, so these are most
important. Then I go through each paragraph of text on the page
and take any important phrases that might be used in the copy
and paste them into the meta keyword tag. I usually separate the
phrases with a comma and no space. This is simply a personal
preference. Using no commas at all in this tag is basically the
same thing, since most engines appear to treat commas as a
space. After I get every important word or phrase from the text
on the page, I add some common misspellings of some of these
same words. I know for a fact that in the past, this could bring
some traffic from some engines, most notably AltaVista. What
About Keyword Repetition? Another common abuse of meta keyword
tags was -- and still is -- the repetition of words. Spammers
found that if they repeated keywords enough times in this meta
tag, the search engines would "think" they were relevant to the
page and perhaps give it a high ranking for those keywords.
Because of this abuse, too much repetition will now hurt you
rather than help you. Never insert the same word twice in a row
in this tag, even if you're using different variations.
(Plurals, ALL CAPS, different tenses, etc.) You can use the same
word in different phrases, but never use that word more than
three or four times within the tag, even if you're using
different variations of it. That's about all there is to it! If
everyone treated these meta tags with the type of respect they
deserve and only put relevant keywords into it, perhaps we could
get it out of its foster home and back to its rightful place in
the family of meta tags!
About the author:
About the author: Prakash K Bengani - SEO Specialist and
Internet Marketing Consultant. Any reproduction of this article
needs to have an html link pointing to http://www.articles-hub.com
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