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Can Meta tags such as the keyword tag bring High Rankings® to my site?
by Jill Whalen (The Web Whiz)
Written April 2000 - Updated
November 2001
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! If it were that simple, I'd 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?
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Meta tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a
web page. Such elements are placed as tags in the head section of an HTML
document.
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This meta tag is usually placed beneath the title and meta
description tags in the <HEAD></HEAD> section of your pages' HTML
code, like this:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>your DESCRIPTIVE KEYWORDS title
goes here</TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Your keyword
rich marketing sales-pitch meta description goes here">
<META
NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="your keywords,go here,separated by a comma,but not a
space">
</HEAD>
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Here is the HTML code for this title tag from live example:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Web Promotion Software "WebCEO" - Search Engine Optimization Software, Web
Promotion, Traffic Analysis, SEO Software </TITLE>
<META
NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT=" Web Promotion Software for Keyword Research, Search
Engine Optimization, Search Engine Submission, Ranking Check, Link Exchange, and
Traffic Analysis ">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT=" Web Site
Promotion,Search Engine Marketing,Website Management,Web Traffic Analysis,Search
Engine Optimization ">
</HEAD>
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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?
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The two most common uses of meta tags on the Web are to provide a
description and to provide meta keywords for a web page. This data may then be
used by search engines (such as Google) to generate and display a list of search
results matching a given query.
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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!
Our credits to the source/author of this article:
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Author: Jill Whalen
Jill Whalen of High Rankings is an internationally recognized
search engine optimization consultant and host of
the free weekly High Rankings Advisor
search engine marketing newsletter.
Jill's handbook, "The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines" teaches business
owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make
sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.
Jill specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, site analysis reports,
SEM seminars and is the co-founder of the new search marketing and website design company,
Search Creative, LLC.
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