Wednesday, 7th January 2009.




If you work with websites, or even search the web, most likely you have heard of “keywords” on webpages. From google adwords to search engines, keywords have been used all over.

At different points, various search engines have placed (or not placed) value on keywords to search websites all over the internet. How many, the weight and value, which and when to use keywords now vary from search engine to search engine.

When creating a static website, it is easy to add the meta elements in the header. When creating a website with wordpress, various plugins can be used.

Another option in WordPress 2.6 is to edit your header.php file to use the tags in a post as your keywords. After tiring of using plugin after plugin and having more database entries than I wanted, I ended up just replacing the meta field for keywords with this snippit.



What you choose for a page title can have a very big impact on search engine rankings. From how visitors glance over results from a search engine to how the search engines use the titles in calculating rankings, the title of the page can make a big difference in how you reach users.

When you choose a page title, you want to make sure that you use different and individual titles for every page on your website. As shown in the previous article - Where the Title is Seen [Links updated to reflect new permalinks and redesign] - The places that the title will be displayed can identify and distinguish one page in a search, bookmark, or shortcut from another. If someone bookmarks or makes a shortcut to 3 different pages on your website, you would want all 3 pages to have different titles. When spiders and robots gather the information from your webpage for displaying results in the search engine, you also want each page to have a different title. By doing this, it will also give you another chance to display your main keywords for the page. For example:



At one point, meta tags were of the utmost importance to search engines. They became an essential part in ranking. That is - until meta tag abuse because widely used as false tactics for listings.

Currently, there are 2 meta tags that are very important when it comes to search engines. The keywords and the description meta tags are the essential ones to use.

When building a website, the hard part is knowing how to target your site for the keywords - for the keywords are what search engines will relate each page to. You want to place about 20 keywords at the most in each page in the meta tags. Also, you want to reuse the same keywords in your page itself in the text. If you use the same keywords in your description (The brief summary that will show up for that page in the search engine) and title, the keyword density (the number of times you use that keyword on the page) will become heavier and give that page a chance to be higher ranked.

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