Small Business Guide to Online Marketing: Creating Meta Keyword Tags

The meta keyword tags, as the name suggests, is the place where you will list keywords that are relevant to the page.

It’s now generally accepted that the meta keyword tags aren’t relevant to the major search engines but even so, they are still counted by some of the lesser search engines so why not include them for that reason.

You always want to use the exact keyword or phrase, that you’re optimizing your page for, as the very first keyword.  Some people think you should only use that keyword and nothing else.

I have some high ranking pages on both sides of that equation so I, personally, don’t know that it matters.

One thing I suggest is that you do some spying on your top competitors to see what they’re doing and simulate their methods.  This is a nice way to go about building a top ranking website anyway.

If you’re able to check out how the top ranking sites are layed out, you’ll get some clues as to how to design and layout your site as well.  You can see which keywords they have in their meta keyword tags and sprinkle those into yours.  Also, pay attention to the number of keywords they are listing.

Stick to the basics, such as your keyword being first in the title, description and keyword tags.  Everything else may be flexible, based on what you find on the top ranking sites.

If their content on that page has a keyword density that ’s higher or lower than normal, you might want to try using that same keyword density on your page.  Pay attention to the page titles, h1,h2,h3 tags and any other stuff you can milk from their layout.

Now, back to keyword tags.

A couple of years ago there was a lot of talk about a concept called LSI (latent semantic indexing).  The theory was that Google was ranking pages based on semantics and that you needed to figure out the words that would normally be used in every day language when discussing the topic of your keyword.

If your keyword was cars, you would want to have words in your content that would normally be included in a conversation about cars such as tires, engines, seats, auto, tail lights, etc.

One thought was to go to Google and type in your keyword using a tilda (~) search.  The tilda search would come up with results that highlighted the words Google thought were related and, therefore, relevant to your keyword.

Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins over at StomperNet pretty much debunked the theory of LSI being so major a part of Google’s algorythm and they put the ball back into the court of proper linking, both externally and internally.

I’ve put together a video on the proper way to create meta keyword tags.

Tagged with: Business Marketing • Business Online • Cars • Exact Keyword • Google • Keyword Density • Keyword Name • Latent Semantic Indexing • Lsi • Major Search Engines • Meta Keyword • Meta Name • Meta Tags • Online Marketing • Page Titles • Phrase • Semantics • Small Business Guide • Title Description

Filed under: Small Business Marketing Success

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