When I first became interested in getting my website to rank in the search engines many years ago it was all about setting the right key words in your META TAG. While the search engines have moved away from this now unfortunately many people have quite cottoned onto this and continue to believe that filling your META KEYWORDS TAG is important.
Essentially my advice is do not bother sweating over it. It is what is in the content that counts more. To know more abut that read my article “Content is King”. Whilst it will not hurt to have them in place be sure that the use of this META TAG complies with search engine ethics for good optimisation (referred to as “white hat” techniques as opposed to “black hat”).
If you are going to use the keywords META TAG be sure that all the words listed are found within that page. Do not create a long list of words with the view that they apply across your whole site. Search engines will in fact penalise you for populating the keywords META TAG with words not contained within the page. Remember your optimisation is related to the page in question, NOT the whole website. If you are going to use this META TAG also keep the list of words to approximately 128 characters or 10 words).
Yes I know there is some different views about how long this META TAG really can be but I will explain a good reason why you should keep it short. You essentially focus on 3 or 4 key search phrases to optimise you r page around and then support this with a list of say 20 to 25 other keywords or phrases to support your key phrase. If you are using the keyword META TAG you should aim to get a saturation or density level for your key search phrases at abut 75% within the keywords TAG and you want your key phrases up at the front. If we go back to our original limit of say 10 words and 128 characters you may now understand why we keep the keywords META TAG tightly controlled.
So where should you place your keywords and phrase? A number of places; but certainly in the “Title” and once again, up front. One SEO suggests that you should place a 1-word buffer in your Title at the beginning before your key phrase and try and get it in twice with slightly different adaptations. It is also important to place your key search phrases into the description META TAG. As well as being used by search engines to understand the “theme” of your page, this information is displayed in the SE results and any keywords are bolded thus drawing the attention of the person reading the results.
The other most important aspect is to place your key search phrases and supporting keywords throughout your page content within normal text paragraphs, headings and in bold type face. You should be aiming for between 1% and 2% on all keywords and key phrases and for your key search phrases I would personally suggest try a little higher. Now you have to do all of this within 300 to 400 words for your whole page.
This not a comprehensive guide but hopefully it shows that the importance once placed on filling up the keywords META TAG should now not be the focus of your attention.
Other articles of relevance to this topic include; How Link Text Can Make a Difference in Your Rankings, Creating traffic to your website – The Secret
