(RushPRnews 6-16-05 )There are many articles in cyberspace regarding keywords and how to use them. Most of the information divulged will confuse instead of helping you. I am here to help you decipher between the hype and the facts.

First off all, what is a keyword? A keyword, or a key phrase is your topic; that information or product for sale. For example: on one of my working site, my three main keywords are writing and press release.

Now these three words are pretty generic, however, when they are used together as a phrase that makes them valuable. They are hardly the only ones that relate, but they are the ones I use most, for the simple reason, that research shows me that they are the most common three words anyone looking for press release services type into an engine.

How are keywords used?

Keywords are placed in two ways, in your Meta tags and in the body text. This is the point of confusion for many. The tendency is to put as many keywords, especially in your entry page Meta tags as possible that relate to the site as a whole. The fact is that it is a very harmful mistake unless the words are part of your entry page. Your entry page is as its name suggests a door way, it is not the only room however, and just as you would not put all of your furniture in the foyer, so too with keywords on the front page. In other words, only put words that are an integral part of the text of that particular page.

Keyword stuffing: Keyword stuffing has lead to considerable abuse. Putting words that are not related to the site at all to trick the engines into serving up their page, even if it's not related to the words they used only leads to being penalized by the engines. Beware of overloading the keyword tag with words that do relate to your site, but are not on the page where the tag lives, once again you will be penalized, just as if you were trying to scam the engines.

Quality over quantity: Over all, the number of letters etc. one can use for keyword tags is about 1000. But in practical reality, anything over 300 to 500 is ignored by the engines. So picking words that are relevant becomes very important. It is much better to use fewer, more relevant words, per page tag, than try to overload the tags with the top end of allowable content. Remember the engine has to wade through everything to get to your content. If the tags themselves are too long, the shallow dip some engines make will mean your content itself may not be read and indexed properly.

Keyword relevance: If your page is too widely based, it's hard for the engine to consider relevant meaning. If you are trying to cover too many subjects at once, it's hard for them to figure what you are about and therefore figure out where to serve up your page in response to a search engine question.. Engines use keywords on your page to determine that relevance.

To recap: remember that you have many pages, and those pages will be read and indexed by the engines. Let them be the focus for each topic/keyword, and leave the entry page for the general contents, but don't over load the entry page with all the keywords unless you have a very tight focus for the site as a whole and can keep it under 500 letters.

The other pages can carry their own weight and provide the same relevance and will be served up by the engines as needed for content, but only if the keywords are accurate. Your site is not just your front door it's a whole, and when it comes to keywords and the engines, you have to think of it as one whole unit.

Article written by Esta Weiss The Web Witch Web designer and SEO
Edited and proofread by Anne Laszlo-Howard
Distributed and published by RushPRnews.
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