Keywords confused me until I realised they can be divided into four types:
- Metatag keywords - keywords that go in the head of the document
- Keyword tags - tags used to label or categorise web pages to aid navigation and search within the website
- Promotional keywords - words or phrases used to represent the content of a web page to search engines
- Cash keywords - words or phrases used to attract appropriate advertising to a web page
You need to consider each of these
Metatag keywords
Metatag keywords are not seen on the screen. They go in the head of the document in a tag that looks like this:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”domain names, custom domains,website names” />
Metatag keywords are much less important than they used to be. Abuse has led them to be ignored by many search engines, including Google. This is because some people load up the tag with duplicate words and phrases that do not represent the content of the site. If you look at the source code of sites, which rank highly on Google you find that many do not use metatag keywords at all. I still use them as they are a good discipline for me to think what the page is about and maybe they will come back into favour.
Keyword tags
Tags are used to label or categorise web pages by blogs, wikis and content management systems. They help navigation and search within websites that do not have a hierarchical structure and therefore cannot use a navigation menu.
Promotional keywords
Promotional keywords represent the content of a web page to search engine robots. Search engines try to match pages with searcher requirements and assess a pages relevance. Pages judged to be more relevant will get higher rankings on the search returns. You can increase your chances of a page getting a higher ranking by ensuring that key word or phrases are prominent on the page. The page author thinks of these words or phrases as keywords although they are not labelled as such.
Promotional keywords can be anywhere within the pages code. Google recommends use in page title, and alt tags for images. It appears that keywords are given higher importance by search engines if they appear close to the top of a web page, especially in headings or highlighted text.
In addition to placing keywords in good positions on the page it is important to choose good key words. For example Web CEO reports 6,187 world searches per day for the term puppies but less than 10 per day for puppy dogs. If you want to describe young dogs on your web page it is obviously better to use puppies that puppy dogs.
I talk about this more in my article on promotional keywords
Cash keywords
Advertising programmes that automatically place ads on your web page (eg Google Adsense) match ads to words and phrases on the page. The aim is to display ads that visitors to your page are likely to click on. At first glance it seems that promotional keywords and cash keywords are the same as they both represent the contents of your page, but they actually represent the page in different ways.
Promotional keywords need to match the potential search phrases someone who is looking for information contained on your page would use in the search box of their search engine. On the other hand when you are putting together cash keywords you are looking for the words potential advertisers choose when they are looking for words on a web page that indicates that visitors to the page are likely to be interested in their products. This can be quite different to the search term of promotional keywords.
Tagged with: Promotion
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