Think carefully when creating keywords as this is the 'key' to visitors finding you out in cyberspace. Prioritise the words in descending order of importance. Consider common misspellings and similar sounding words to what you want people to find. As a good exercise, type in the keyword to the areas that you wish to be found and see what pages appear in your search engine. Then view their source code - Right click and select View Source. They've got what you need!

Meta Tag tips

The Strategy: Targeted vs Blanket
This is something you have to decide right from the beginning. It's quite simple. If you have a large list of keywords, your pages will be found with a broad spectrum of search strings, but they're less likely to be at the top of the results lists (blanket strategy). If you use a limited number of keywords, it increases the density of those few keywords and therefore puts them high up the list (targeted strategy).

So, if your keyword list is naturally short (ie. you're confident that users will search for these above all others) then the target strategy is for you. If you have a long list of products, then the blanket method is for you.  

Empathy With Your Customers
Imagine that you're one of the people who's looking for your type of product. If you had to put a search string into a form, what would it be? The most obvious words are the ones you want to use. If you have to think too hard you'll probably come up with an obscure word that nobody else would think of searching for, which defeats the object.

Important: It doesn't matter whether or not you actually sell the product! Don't limit yourself by thinking "What do I sell?" Instead, put yourself in your customers' shoes and ask yourself "What problems and needs is my product solving?" For example, if you're selling massage oils, "sports injuries" would be a good keyword phrase which you wouldn't have thought of if you'd simply browsed a list of your products for inspiration.  

Plurals
When you've completed your keywords list, add the letter 's' to the end of every word (or add the plural of the word to the list in the case of words like cactus/cacti). Many people search for 'games' or 'hotels' and if your keywords are in the singular your page won't be listed and your efforts will have been wasted, whereas your page will be listed in a search for the singular. A search for 'hotel' will find your keyword 'hotels' for example. 

Common words  
Avoid words which have a lot to do with the Net in general. When a user searches for one of these words they get a huge number of results and yours is likely to be way down the list.

The purpose of keywords is to target words that will bring people to your site as opposed to other people's. Since nearly every site on the Net is to do with 'web' or 'internet' or 'services', using these words to target your audience is pretty pointless.

Most of the robot-driven engines actively ignore common words like this.

Mispelings  
If any of your keywords are routinely mis-spelled, include the incorrect version in your keyword list. If you're selling satellite TV dishes, include 'sattelite' on your list. 

Keyword Phrases  
These days there are so many pages on the Web that users usually search for 'strings' of at least two or three related words at once, for example "california carpet fitters". Now, if you have all three words on your list separately, you'll be listed below somebody else's page if they've targeted all three words together, in a Keyword Phrase.

In the above example you would treat "california carpet fitters" as one word which just happens to have space characters in it 

Test Your Keywords  
Now keep your list handy, visit all the major search engines and enter your keywords one by one to see what comes up in the search results list. Study a few of the top pages which will have a similar topic to yours, and see if there are any other good keywords you could add to your list which you hadn't thought of before. Don't feel guilty about 'cheating', this is common practice.

Don't be tempted to paste the code from the top listings straight onto your page. If you get into the habit of doing that type of thing you'll always be following others and picking up the scraps. The aim is to get ahead of others, and that means being original. That applies to your business in general, not just your promotion strategy.  

The Voyeurs  
There are several places you can go to watch users inputting search strings in "real time". The following pages will open in a new browser:

• Magellan Voyeur (the original one)

• WebCrawler Search Ticker

• Metacrawler MetaSpy

I challenge you to watch your screen for five minutes without the word "sex" appearing. Your eyes will boggle at some of these words, it regularly has me laughing out loud.

You should treat this just as a fun exercise to take time out from the brain-frying info you've just been reading. If the keywords you've already picked do happen to appear often that's a good thing of course, but don't make the mistake of taking these toys too seriously and targeting keywords simply because they appear often. An off-topic keyword is no keyword at all.  

Yahoo! Top 200
There's a "mole" at Yahoo! He's uploaded a list of the most common keywords input on Yahoo! (again, mostly sexual of course). Another toy, not to be acted upon: Yahoo! Top 200.

<TITLE>Tag
The page <TITLE> is by far the most powerful aspect. Robots consider the <TITLE> of a page to be the most telling description of the content of a page.

Note: this does not mean the first major heading on the page itself, it means the caption which appears on the title bar of your browser. It will look at this first, and if it finds a keyword here your page will be displayed above other pages which only have the keyword in the main body of text. Therefore, choose your <TITLE> keywords carefully. Use a few of the most powerful ones and don't make your <TITLE> as long as your arm just to fit all your keywords in (unless your site consists of only one page).

If you have plenty of powerful keywords and a good number of sub-pages, remember that each of those sub-pages has <TITLE> and META fields lying idle. Keep each sub-page <TITLE> short, with a different keyword or two in each. That way, whatever search string the user inputs, there will be one of your pages near the top of the list.

Changing your <TITLE>s regularly used to be a sneaky way to have your pages scattered all over a deep engine's results list. When the robot visited, it thought the new title represented a new page and gave it a new listing. This is becoming less effective now, as the robots become more sophisticated. Worth a try though, if you're bored.

Very important: your <TITLE> is what will appear as the clickable link on the results list. Remember that it's a human who's doing the clicking, so a listing at position #1 that consists of a long string of keywords might not generate as much traffic as a clear descriptive caption halfway down the same list.

<Body> Tag
Keyword Density
The deep search engines sort pages in order of the density of keywords in the document. A simplified example: if my page contained just two words: 'london hotel' then a search for 'london hotel' would put my page at the top of the list because it has a 100% density of the keywords requested. In other words, it doesn't matter how many times keywords appear in the document, only the percentage. This also applies to the document <TITLE>.

One way to capitalise on this is to saturate your document with invisible keywords. For example, I could type london hotel london hotel london hotel... a hundred times and enclose it all in <!-- comment tags --> but the search engine administrators got wise to this a long time ago, and they actively penalise pages that use this method, so I'd forget about this if I were you.

Camouflaged Text: Bad Idea
Another trick that you should definitely not use is to "camouflage" long keyword lists against the background colour of your page. Infoseek has publicly declared that their robot excludes pages that have any text the same colour as the <BODY BGCOLOR. This has upset people who have done this as a part of their design, but there's a lesson to be learned. People are getting around this by using a slightly different colour which still makes their spam invisible, for example their BGCOLOR will be FFFFFF and their spammed keywords will be FFFFFE so the robot won't catch it. However, I would still advise against this because no matter how tiny you make the text, it's still going to produce an ugly gap on your page.

Keep 'Em High
The power of the keywords in the main body of your page diminishes as you go further down the page, so try to include plenty of keywords in the first few paragraphs of text. A <H1> or <H2> heading at the top of the page is a good idea. Always try to use heading tags rather than FONT SIZE whenever possible.

<META> Tags
META keywords will give you an edge, and it's important to have them. However, they cannot even lick the boots of page <TITLE>s and they also fall below page content keyword density in importance.

Only certain engines recognise META tags, but these happen to be the important ones - Alta Vista and Infoseek spring to mind.

All of the deep search engines will store all the words on your page, but you can actually tell the META-enabled ones how to display your page in their results list, and also 'inject' keywords straight into the robot's brain. You're allowed up to 200 keywords, so include your whole keyword list.

Put META tags on all the pages you intend to promote ie. all the pages on your site.

Notes On META Tags:
Don't repeat the same keyword more than 7 times - I would recommend 3 times, to be safe - otherwise the whole lot is ignored and your page might even get 'penalised' (given low priority or even not included at all). Don't list your repeated keywords next to each other, it's easier to see that you're spamming. For example, if you have 3 keywords do it like this:

web, site, promotion, web, site, promotion, web, site, promotion

Not like this:

web, web, web, site, site, site, promotion, promotion, promotion 

Restrict your META description to 150 characters (including spaces). This is the optimum length to have the whole description displayed on all the search engines, without it being cut short.

A META description does not require keywords! Just make it appealing to a human. This text is what's going to convince them to click your listing, so think carefully about it. Have a different META description for each page on your site. Your keywords need to be reflected in the page's content.

In particular, that means you need HTML text on your page. Sometimes sites present large sections of copy via graphics. It looks pretty, but search engines can't read those graphics. That means they miss out on text that might make your site more relevant. Some of the search engines will index ALT text and comment information, along with meta tags. But to be safe, use HTML text whenever possible. Some of your human visitors will appreciate it, also.

Describe your Web site, not your company. The name of the game is to get the user to your Web site. Once they've arrived there, you can describe your company to your heart's content, that's what it's there for. Always tell the user why they should visit your site. They're searching for a Web site, not a company's annual turnover.

Keep each META tag on a single line of your HTML code, without line breaks.

Think basics
Some search engines see the web the way someone using a very old browser might. They may not read image maps. They may not read frames. You need to anticipate these problems, or a search engine may not index any or all your web pages.

The use of Image Maps
Often, designers create only image map links from the home page to inside pages. A search engine that can't follow these links won't be able to get "inside" the site. Unfortunately, the most descriptive, relevant pages are often inside pages rather than the home page.

Solve this problem by adding some HTML hyperlinks to the home page that lead to major inside pages or sections of your web site. This is something that will help some of your human visitors, also. Put them down at the bottom of the page. The search engine will find them and follow them.

Also consider making a site map page with text links to everything in your web site. You can submit this page, which will help the search engines locate pages within your web site.

Finally, be sure you do a good job of linking internally between your pages. If you naturally point to different pages from within your site, you increase the odds that search engines will follow links and find more of your web site.

Frames can kill
Some of the major search engines cannot follow frame links. Make sure there is an alternative method for them to enter and index your site, either through meta tags or smart design. For more information, see the tips on using frames.

Dynamic Doorblocks
Generating pages via CGI or database-delivery? Expect that some of the search engines won't be able to index them. Consider creating static pages whenever possible, perhaps using the database to update the pages, not to generate them on the fly. Also, avoid symbols in your URLs, especially the ? symbol. Search engines tend to choke on it. 

On-line Resources

• www.webdeveloper.com/html/html_metatags.html

• www.webdeveloper.com/html/html_metatag_res.html

• www.stack.nl/~galactus/html/meta.html

• vancouver-webpages.com/META/

• vancouver-webpages.com/META/mk-metas.html

• wdvl.com/Authoring/HTML/Head/Meta/

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