Keywords

Lack of well-chosen keywords and phrases on your Web site is a truly terrible mistake to make, as search engine spiders depend on these to find your site; as well as search engine users. If you have not targeted specific and precise keywords for your website, then you will not be easily found. Period.

Lack of Targeted Keywords Equals Lack of Traffic

For example, if you sell used art textbooks and just insert the non-specific word “book” into your Meta tags and site content, guess what?

Not only will you probably not show up in at least the first fifteen pages of search results, but users that actually find your site by some quirk of fate will most likely turn around and leave as soon as they get there (unless, again, by some quirk of fate, they are looking for used art textbooks.

Not gonna happen.).

Keyword Tools

So how do you figure out these keywords and phrases? Here are a couple of great keyword tools that can help you do this:

• Digital Tracker Keyword Suggestion: Digital Tracker is absolutely invaluable. I use this every day.
• Free Keyword Suggestion Tool:Displays how many times a certain keyword was searched for in a given month. Shows all related searches for the entered keyword.
• Google Keyword Tool: "The Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaigns and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends."

All of these keyword tools can help you get a clear idea of what people are actually searching for, and then you can use those words within your site copy and structure to attract more people to your site.

It's all about providing the better user experience - if people can't find your site, no matter how great your service or site is, you're not providing that good user experience.

Where To Put Keywords

Now that you've got your basic keyword research started, you need to know where to put these keywords on your Web site.

• Title Tag: The title tag is a great place to use your keyword phrases. The title tag consists of those words you see at the top of your browser window in the blue space, and it is what search engines grab for the title display in their search results; so obviously, it's an important part of your search engine optimization strategy. Here's an example: [Keyword Phrase] - How To [Keyword Phrase 2].
• Headline: Most people who read on the Web scan Web pages quickly. This is why headlines are so important - they give your reader a chance to get what they need fast with a minimum of fuss (again, back to that great user experience). Use your keyword phrase again in the headline: How To [Keyword Phrase].
• Content: Now you need to write your keyword phrases into your site content. This is where it can get tricky, because it's easy to just write that keyword phrase where ever that keyword phrase might fit into where the keyword phrase could go (see what I mean? sounds terrible!). Be natural about it - easier than it sounds, but with practice you'll get it.

Keywords Increase Web Site Traffic

No doubt about it - if you're able to place well-researched keyword phrases into your site content and structure, you will attract more searchers to your site, and provide a better user experience because they will be able to find what they are looking for. More than anything else - high rankings, increased traffic, etc. - the top goal should be to provide the best user experience for every single person that comes to your site, and making sure your keyword phrases serve their needs is a big part of that.

Keywords in HTML

What are HTML Keywords

Keywords in HTML are words that you are targeting on a web page. They are typically short phrases that represent what the page is about. They are also, hopefully, the words that someone might type into a search engine and find your page.
In general, HTML keywords are found whether you intend them to be there or not. Keywords are just text like any other text, and when a search engine views your page, they look at the text and attempt to make a decision regarding what the page is about based on the text it sees.

Meta Data in HTML

But the most common use of the term “keywords” in HTML is as meta data. This is typically thought of as the meta keywords tag, and is written in HTML like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="keywords,html keywords,meta keywords,keyword data" />

This meta tag is not very important. Most search engines don't use the keywords meta tag because it can be manipulated so easily by the web page writer.

In other words, many page writers used to put random keywords into the keywords tag, in the hopes that the page would be optimized for those (probably more popular) phrases.

A More Important HTML Meta Tag Than Keywords: Description

If you are going to include meta data on your web pages, you should ignore the keywords tag, and instead use the meta description tag. This is meta data that nearly every search engine uses to describe your web page in their index. And that extra information could mean the difference from a customer clicking on your site for information or someone else's.

HTML Keywords and Search Engines

Instead of using the keywords meta tag, you should think about keywords in the actual content of your web page.

These are the terms that the search engines will use to evaluate what the page is about, and thus where it should appear in their search results. This allows you to first write content that is useful, and then focus on search engine optimization to optimize that content for the keywords you are focusing on for that page.

How to Choose HTML Keywords

When you are choosing the keyword phrase for a web page, you should first focus on just one phrase per web page. It is not a good idea to try to optimize one web page for many different things, as this will confuse not only the search engines, but more importantly your readers.
One strategy that may seem counter-intuitive, but works well for many sites is to choose “long-tail” keywords. These are the keywords that don't get huge amounts of search traffic. Because they aren't as popular with searchers, they aren't as competitive and it's possible to rank higher in search for them. This gets your site noticed and gets you more credibility. And as your site gains credibility it will start ranking higher for more popular terms.

HTML Keywords Generators and Other Keywords Tools

Another way to determine the keywords in your HTML is to use a keyword generator. There are many online tools that will analyze your web page content and tell you how many times various phrases are used on your page. These are typically called keyword density analyzers. That previous link shows you some free ones that I have found, or you can check out keyword density tools recommended by other About.com readers.

How Meta Tags Really Affect Your Website

Meta Tags are an important, but often misunderstood, aspect of web design. Meta Tags contain information or “metadata” about your website. This information, which is in the <head> of an HTML document, is not meant to be read by the people that visit that site, but is intended for browsers, web servers, and search engines.
Now, you may have noticed that “search engines” were included in the aforementioned list.

Yes, search engines do read a site’s metadata, but they do not use that information in their search ranking algorithms any longer. Years ago, search engines did use Meta Tags as one of the signals that influenced rankings, but rampant abuse of these tags destroyed their use as a rankings signal in all major search engines today.

This causes confusion for many people who may have once been told that they had to “change their Meta Tags” in order to improve search engine rankings, but who have not kept up with changes in SEO practices and do not realize that, while still valuable in many ways, Meta Tags no longer have impact on search engine rankings.

So what do Meta Tags do in 2015 and how do they, if at all, help a site be optimized for people? Here’s a rundown of the most common Meta Tags used on websites and exactly what their purpose is.

Description

The Meta Description tag is one of the ones that used to be used by search engines for ranking purposes. Because of this, many people still mistakenly believe that they can seed this tag with SEO-centric keywords and impact their search engine placement.

That is no longer the case, but that does not mean this tag is not still important. Many search engines will use the content of this tag, which should contain a short description of the content on that page, as the description used in the search engine results page (SERP) when that page is returned with a search query.

There is no guarantee that the search engine will use the text from your Meta Description tag, but they do take it as a suggestion, so it is a good idea to write a clear, concise description of your page using this tag.

Keywords                      

Keywords was another tag that search engines used to use in their rankings calculations. This is the one that was prone to abuse and it is no longer a factor in rankings. Some SEO specialists use this tag simply to list out the keywords that a given page is optimized for. While the tag will not impact SEO rankings, it does give anyone working on the code of the site a clear list of which keywords are relevant to that page.

Author

The Meta Author tag is often used to list the person or company who created that page or website, almost like a signature in the code. Some web designers prefer this method over adding a “Website design by…” link in the footer of the site.

Robots

The Meta Robots tag lets the search engine’s crawlers know whether or not a page should be indexed and included in their database. If you have a page on your site that is not intended for the general public, like a page for employees only, using the Robots tags is one way you can block that page from search engines.

Language

Websites that contains pages with different languages can use the Meta Language tag to let the browser know which language a given page is written in. This is not for computer coding languages, but for human languages like English, Spanish, French, etc.

Revised

The Meta Revised tag lists when the page was last changed. This can be helpful since it will let a search engine know if recent changes have been made to the content of that page and if, therefore, that page should be crawled again and reindexed.

Title Tag

One final HTML element that is worth mentioning is the <title> tag that is found near the start of all webpages. Like Meta Tags, the title tag is not really meant for people, but rather for machines. Unlike Meta Tags, however, the title tag does show up in the web browser in a few places:

• The top of the browser window, in the toolbar
• When a page is added as a bookmark or favorite, this is the title that will be used
• In the SERP page, this is the title that will be used for the page, displaying the first 50 to 60 characters

Each HTML document must only contain 1 title tag and this tag is actually used by search engines in their ranking algorithms. The content of the title tag should be a short, clear description of the content found on that page.