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• Authors could be sloppy in their writing. They didn’t have to worry about writing clearly. They—or someone else—could add keywords after they wrote that would highlight the key themes.
• Website owners could play tricks with keyword metatags. These tags are fed to the search engines and are not seen by someone looking at the page. Thus, some tricksters figured, why not place popular—but irrelevant—keywords into these tags and thus attract more traffic? For this reason, most search engines now ignore keyword metatags.

People search with their own keywords. When they scan a page of search results, they are looking for a match. Should they decide to come to your page they are looking for an even greater match. So, if they search for “The Passion of The Christ,” they are happiest when they see that exact phrase in the actual content.

Here are some tips for writing better keywords:

1. What are you trying to say? What are the keywords that best summarize what you are trying to say? Answer these questions before you write, not after.
2. Who are you trying to say it to? Write for how your target audience searches. Writing is a form of communication. You need to understand how your reader thinks. Use the keywords they use. That significantly increases the chances of them finding and reading you. (Use services such as WordTracker, Overture, Google AdWords)
3. Make sure that the most important keywords get used in the heading and summary. Always lead with your best keywords. You are not writing a murder mystery. Tell them who did it in the heading.
4. Avoid single keywords. Increasingly, people are searching with two or more words. So, use key phrases rather than individual keywords.
5. Don’t have more than three key phrases in any one piece of content. Web content should be short and focused on a single theme, where possible. That makes it much easier to read and much easier for a search engine to properly index.
6. Introduce synonyms in your content where appropriate. Some people search for laptops, some for notebooks. Some people search for heart disease, some for cardiovascular disease.
7. Don’t over-repeat your keywords/phrases. Search engines like to see the keyword/phrase repeated on a page. But don’t do it too much, as it will make your content look unprofessional. After all, there’s no point in bringing someone to your website and then creating a bad impression.

Gerry McGovern
 

Related links

Wordtracker

Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool

Related articles
Metadata and classification

Writing for the Web

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