Keywords

KEYWORDS

• Choosing the wrong keywords

No matter how much time and effort is spent in all other areas of preparing your website for search engines, it will all be for nothing if you have chosen the wrong keywords. The keywords that you choose have to be the most relevant ones possible. In other words they need to be the words that Internet users would most likely use to search for your site.

You rarely want to target a single keyword since with the billions of words indexed on the Web now, generally one word simply won't cut it. People learn quickly that if they type in "software" or "computers" that they get a million listings and most are irrelevant!

• Having too many keywords in your meta-tags

Many search engines limit your description to around 150 characters. So your description needs to be crammed with suitable keywords and keyword phrases. The more keywords, and the more strictly they describe your Web site, the more highly targeted traffic you're going to harvest.

Previously, webmasters would fill their meta-tags with long lists of keywords in order to gain a high ranking in the results of different search engines. This may have been successful in the past, but now if you try something like this you will probably be heavily penalised by search engines or your website will be left out of their indexes altogether.

• Repeating your keywords too often or not enough

The third keyword-related mistake that people make is constantly repeating their keywords instead of having good quality text on their page. This is another practice that is penalized by the search engines, who consider this to be a spamming technique. Websites found to contain this type of 'spam' may be banned from the search engine or simply left out of their index.

You want your site to rank well in relevancy so you do not want to use too few keywords. The key is to find the right equation!