By WorkZ Staff

In a perfect cyberworld, each time a potential customer asked a search engine about your product, company, or industry your site's URL would appear at the top of the results list. Alas, you are unlikely to achieve this perfection any time soon, but you can increase your site's visibility with well-chosen and well-deployed keywords.

Using Keywords

Your keyword strategy is an important part of your overall online promotion plan. Good, well-placed keywords can help bring much-needed traffic to your site. But they are not a panacea. While they are important, your keywording efforts should take an appropriate place alongside your other promotions. In fact, for many (if not most) sites, it may be just as important to buy advertising on other sites, to set up an affiliate program, to network widely in the community you serve, to create strategic alliances, or to simply keep making your site better.

And bear in mind that your keyword strategy is an adjunct to, not a replacement for, the process of registering your site with the directories and search engines (which you can do either on your own or with the help of a site submission service). Your keyword efforts are primarily for the automatic indexing conducted by the search engines' "spiders," "robots," and "webcrawlers."

Deploying your keywords is a two-step process. First, you select your keywords, and then you present them in such a way that the search engines will recognize them and index your site appropriately.

Selecting Keywords

Begin by brainstorming all of the words that can be used to describe your products, your business, and your industry. More to the point, try to figure out what words prospective customers might use when they come looking for you. You will probably end up with a long list, consisting of both very specific words that name your products and more generic words that describe your type of products and your industry.

Now edit your list down to no more than 20 words and multiple-word phrases. And make sure that your editing process eliminates as many duplications of words as possible, since some search engines regard more than three repetitions of a keyword as spamming.

It will probably not be difficult to get a high search-engine placement with specific keywords, like your company name. The real challenge is to get a high ranking with the generic words that apply to the industry you are in and the products you sell. We will do a story specifically on this challenge in an upcoming article.

Presenting Keywords

Once you have selected your list of keywords, you need to put them in your web pages in such a way that the search engines' robots and spiders will properly index your site. Obviously, you will include your list of keywords in the META "keywords" tag, but you will also want to use your keywords in your site title and in your description of your site. There are three HTML tags that let you present your keywords, and a few other HTML tags and attributes come into play as well.

The Meta "Description" Tag

Search engines permit anywhere from 135 to 395 characters in the META description tag. Since this is what will describe your site to most searchers, make sure that the first 135 characters adequately describe your site.

The META "Keywords" Tag

This is the obvious place for your keywords. Keep your list of keywords as short as possible, and use both individual words and keyword phrases. A large percentage of searchers enter incorrect spellings, so you might want to include common misspellings of your keywords. And be aware that some search engines' agents are case-sensitive, so you might want to include punctuation variations as well.

The TITLE Tag

Most search engines use the title tag as the name of your site in the search results listings. It's not a required tag in HTML syntax, but if you leave it out, your site may show up named "No Title." Some search engines include only the first 60 characters of the title, so either keep your title under 60 characters or at least make the first 60 characters meaningful on their own.

These three tags all go within the HTML HEAD tag.

Be aware that META tags are not the only factor that affects search engine placement, as this quote from Search Engine Watch points out:

Meta tags are what many web designers mistakenly assume are the "secret" to propelling their web pages to the top of the rankings. HotBot and Infoseek do give a slight boost to pages with keywords in their meta tags. But Excite doesn't read them at all, and there are plenty of examples where pages without meta tags still get highly ranked. They can be part of the recipe, but they are not necessarily the secret ingredient.

The HTML BODY Tag

The HTML tag also comes into play for many search engines. Rather than emphasizing what you say is important in your title and META tags, some search engines analyze the content of your site to determine its relevance to people who use their search engine. This is most often done by analyzing the words that appear within the HTML tag. These analyses often assign more importance to the first few paragraphs of content, so be sure that the pages you want indexed have strong opening content.

If your site uses a lot of graphics, and you want to attempt to get the content of the images indexed, be sure to use the ALT attribute of the IMG tag. Some search engines index the alternate text that you include in this tag along with the other content on your page.

One more point: Don't "spoof" the search engines. Here's what HotBot has to say about this practice:

We're aware that some people create pages to maliciously "spoof" search engines - making search engines return pages that are irrelevant to the search at hand or pages that rank higher than their content warrants. Common spoofing techniques include the senseless repetition of words, inserting of META tags unrelated to the document's content, or the use of words that cannot be read due to their small size or color. If HotBot recognizes any spoofing technique, it will severely penalize a page's ranking.

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About the Author:
The WorkZ staff is made up of gurus in many areas of expertise including Sales, Marketing, all aspects of the Internet, Technology, even starting and running businesses.

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