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The subject of keywords is becoming
messy and confusing. Some designers say to use single descriptive
words that describe your site or service. Some profess to put short
phrases in the keyword section that describe your site. Some will
tell you keywords are not important, only the title counts. Well,
they are all correct and they are, in general, worthless. The major
search engines are getting very smart regarding keywords and rankings.
Do a little test for yourself. Pick one of the major search engines
and do a search on some subject. Look for some unusual keywords.
Select one of the pages that turns up in the search. You may have
to review the search engine's advanced search notes to find exactly
how to control how it searches and prioritizes sites. For example:
I used AltaVista as the search engine
(www.altavista.com). At AltaVista, a "+" in front of a
word means that that word MUST be found on the page. Enter the search
term "+dogs +eye +color". The first entry in the list
(at least at the time I wrote this document) is
"West Coast Hockey League" at "http://www.wchl.com/"
This is a good example of how keywords
are NOT the key to getting a good listing position. Assuming you
are using either Internet Explorer or Netscape, click on view and
then click on "Source" or "Page Source". This
will show you the code that makes the page work. However, if you
search the page, you will NOT find any phrase starting with "keywords"
(the required preamble for placing keywords on a web page). Keywords
are not the KEY to getting found or listed. The next paragraph will
give more details of how the search engines are working today.
Most of the top search engines actually
index (examine and catalog) THE ENTIRE PAGE. Some of them even index
all of the pages on your website. If you really dig down into the
details of what each search engine is looking for, several will
actually state that "keywords" are ignored! There is more
to getting your pages indexed by a search engine than can be covered
in this outline and hiring someone to help you with this is usually
a good investment, especially if you need to get listed as quickly
as possible.
You should be aware of one gimmick used
by some of these indexing specialists. There are many of these companies
who advertise that they are so good, they guarantee a top listing
(top 10 or 20) in the top search engines. Well, be careful if you
select an indexing company based on one of these claims. In order
to prove that they got your page listed in the locations they guarantee,
they will enter some search words into the appropriate search engine
and wait for your site to show up. However, they will also tell
you that the key words they entered have been carefully chosen as
appropriate for your website. Consider the fact that if you choose
your search criteria carefully, and target it carefully, all under
the guise of "appropriate for your website", you can make
almost any web page list near the top on any search engine. Consider
this. If I put in a few keywords and include the title to your site
as required keywords, your site is likely not only to be number
one in the list of found sites, BUT THE ONLY ONE! This hardly has
any meaning in the real world. In order to determine what your ranking
is in a particular search engine, you must enter search keys that
are realistic. Search keys that your customer will actually use.
This will never be a fixed list. If you are not sure, ask some friends
or customers what they would enter if they were looking for products
or services that you offer. This will give you a better perspective.
Some people spend a tremendous amount
of time coming up with keywords to use in their website. Spend some
time and look deep into the information provided by some of the
major search engines regarding what they are looking for in terms
of page ranking. Most of the major search engines are getting very
specific about what they are looking for. Most will tell you that
keywords are treated just like the rest of the words on your page.
Some will even tell you that keywords are IGNORED all-together!
Most search engines are looking for descriptive text at the beginning
of the page. Your keywords can actually get you banned
from some search engines. Most of these major search engines want
a good description of your page in the first half of the page. They
want good descriptive words, but they do not want you to repeat
the meaningful words over and over, just to repeat them. For example.
If your keywords repeat special words over and over: "metal
forming, metal bending, metal polishing, metal cutting….",
etc. Some major search engines may read this as an attempt to repeat
special words over and over. THIS CAN GET YOU BANNED from a search
engine! Coming up with a good set of keywords is not a separate
task from the development of the rest of your page. Your entire
page must be specific (especially in the text of the first half
of the page) towards your service or product.
© 2001 - Barry
Wroobel - Discovery Data Systems, inc.
(note: Set left and right printer margins
to 0.25" for printing)
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