How to Format Your ‘Keywords’ Meta-Tag

<meta keywords=”insert primary keyword, secondary keyword, one additional keyword </ >

Search Engines have been using ‘keywords’ to index your web site into ‘relevant’ topics since the beginning days of the Internet Boom.

A Brief History

Early web designers, and programmers who were savvy to keyword tags, used this technique to prosper early in the online revolution, shooting their way to the top. Other, less reputable programmers used a technique known today as “keyword spamming”.

Email Spamming

We have all heard of email spamming – the process by which individuals, collect and mass market email offerings to thousands and millions of email addresses unwanted and un-ask for. For a short time a similar technique was used in the keyword meta-tags.

Keyword Spamming

Developers, marketers and programmers of that time, believed that the more words you had in your ‘keyword meta-tag’ the better. They would use hundreds of keywords (many of which were not relevant to the content of that individual web page), and they would even go as far as putting the entire text content in the keyword section.

Search engines collecting data about web sites were getting inundated with lots of (for lack of a better word) garbage text – spam. It was slowing down search results, filling up servers, increasing their bandwidth usage and giving poor or unrelated results.

Relevant Search Results

As search engines became familiar with unsavory programming techniques, they quickly changed the way they seek, store and post results. Relevant search results are results that relate to the specific terms you put into the search engine in order to get a specific result.

Search engines began to vary the amount of ‘keyword’ data it would collect. Google.com even implemented human follow up on web sites as they were getting indexed. It was (and I believe that it still is) kind of a hunt-and-peck system of human verification as new web sites were being discovered, but when a web site was found that was using less than reputable SEO practices it often resulted in either a ‘time-out’ in the infamous “Google Sand Box” (which they still deny exists), a bad ranking (if any) or banishment from the Google database – oooh!

How to format your ‘keywords’ meta-tag properly:

1. Keep them concise
2. Make sure each one relates to the topic of the web page you are using them on
3. Use no more than 3 or 4 keywords or phrases – see example below
4. Choose at least one major keyword or phrase – be specific
5. Choose at least one minor keyword or phrase – be specific
6. Choose a general topic phrase – more general to your topic
   A specific search term might be
   “#search engine optimization” or
   “#seo strategies“;
   “#internet marketing” or
   “#internet marketing services” is a more general category, but still related.

A good keyword meta-tag for a search engine optimization company may look something like this:

<meta keywords=”#search engine optimization, seo strategies, internet marketing services, oklahoma</ >

This short set of keywords is actually crammed full of useful variations. A search engine can put words together like:

• search engine strategies
• seo services
• internet marketing
• internet marketing strategies
• seo oklahoma
• etc…

Although as we mentioned, the first keyword has more weight to the search engines than the last keyword, they can be helpful in almost any of the combination’s that you can think of. So without repeating words, and using strategically chosen words or phrases, you actually increase your marketing ability.

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