As I’ve shared with you in a previous post, getting your keywords targeted on your website is important, period. There are several top-level steps that are really considered basics to SEO practice. One of these steps is entering your keywords into the meta keyword tags within your website code. Back in October I shared some insight about Google meta keywords tag and the fact that it is NOT considered important in the Google algorithm. Well, some people have said the same goes for Yahoo, but that’s not necessarily accurate.

In case you are tilting your head in confusion, let me go over why some search engines don’t value the meta keyword tag. Years ago, more like a decade, webmasters did everything they knew about to get their websites found. Search engines were no where near the quality they are now. If you searched for something there was a good probability that the results would have a mix of content – some what you wanted, some completely unrelated. A reason these results were less than accurate was because of the meta keyword tag. Webmasters would enter a slew of keywords in the code hoping that popular searched keywords would get their sites seen…even though the content had NOTHING to do with the keyword.

For instance, if the website was all about customizing computers, the keyword meta tag may/would include ‘cars’, ‘bmw’, and ‘money’ for the sole purpose in simply getting visitors. As the person doing the search, it made finding what you wanted far more painful than it should have been.

So…that’s when Google started developing more sophisticated search algorithyms to provide relevant, quality results. At some point (I doubt it was right away) Google stopped including the keywords meta tag in the search algorithm but not all search engines have followed suit. You can’t assume Yahoo or any other search engine plays by the same rules as Google – they don’t know all the rules Google uses, nor do I unfortunately.

Simple tests have been performed to debunk whether or not Yahoo really looks at the keyword meta tag. Despite what Yahoo announced it seems they DO still look for the keyword tag. To learn how this was determined, read the post at Search Engine Land on why they claim Yahoo still uses the meta keyword tag.

So don’t neglect to include your keywords tag within your website. Just because Google doesn’t look at it isn’t a good enough reason not to include it.

Soon I’ll be reporting on the results of Bing/Live since that’s the other big search engine in the group. Since “Bing” is so new, it might be harder to find similar answers. And, who knows, maybe they too will announce less-than-accurate data.

Stay tuned!

Several years ago I can recall when search engines lacked the ability to provide us with good quality results, but that has certainly changed. During the past few years search engines have dramatically enhanced their search capabilities, accuracy, speed and functionality. The top three search engines to date are Google, Yahoo and Bing (previously known as MSN/Live) which serve millions of searches every month on an unlimited number of subjects.

As a website or business owner, it’s in your best interest to carefully target your website with keywords that will help get you ranked high on these (and other) search engines. But how do you do this without the expertise? It can be somewhat time consuming but a modest attempt can do enough to make a difference in your search engine ranking.

To help you, I’d like to stress the following key points:

• Break down your website so you have each page targeting up to 3 related keywords. For example, if you have a page that is selling writing services, you can target copy writing, copy editing and website copy.
• In the website code, your ‘keywords’ meta data should list the same keywords you are targeting in your page. In the above example, copy writing, copy editing and website copy would be the keywords. There is no need to use more than 5 keywords here.
• Try to use the keywords (at LEAST one of them) in the <title> of the page. Again, this would be in the code as well.
• The meta description should use the keywords, all of them if possible. The keywords will show up as bold text in the results when someone does a search.
• Use internal links (to other pages on YOUR website) to related content/pages.

Those are basic necessities to using your website keywords properly for SEO purposes. You should also do some simple research to find out who your competition is for the keywords. Simply go to the three above listed search engines and perform searches for the keywords you want to target. You can see what they do on their website which may be helping to keep their rankings high. Additionally, you must realize that your website will not have an immediate effect to searches so give it a week or two to get indexed.

Update: Please read this update regarding choosing meta keywords