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The right words in the right places

Posted 9 May 2007 at 9:48AM by Simon Dickson in Managing your website

Last week I talked a bit about choosing the right words to use on your website, to pick up the maximum search engine traffic. But that's only half the battle: you need to be putting them in the right places.

Computers are very good at reading, but not so good at understanding. You and I can read a web page, and (generally!) know what it is about. If we tried to choose a single word to sum up the subject of the page, we could probably do a decent job, and would probably offer the same suggestions. But all a computer sees is characters on a page: it needs to apply some mechanical logic to establish which words are most significant.

There are a few obvious things you can do. We've talked previously about the page's TITLE tag: understandably, if a particular word is in the official page title, it's probably highly relevant. The same also goes for the page URL, incidentally. If your website's publishing system gives you control over page or folder names, make sure you put your chosen keywords in there. (This can of course be a problem with some database-driven websites which use reference numbers in the page addresses.) If you're considering launching a new website, you might even want to put the keyword in the main site address (if a suitable domain is still available).

Something else to bear in mind is the page markup code. Basic HTML has a series of 'heading tags', from H1 down to H6: the H1 element would typically be the main title of the page, the H2 tag would be used for subheadings, the H3 tag for sub-subheadings, and so on. However, as HTML developed techniques for specifying fonts, colours and sizes of text, many web designers lost sight of the markup principle. It's far from unusual to see pages with no heading tags whatsoever.

If you're a search engine, and you see certain words marked up with the officially-endorsed heading tags, you can safely assume that words used in those headings are highly relevant to the text which follows them. So if you're using heading tags in your page templates, get those magic words in there; and if you're not, then you really should be.

One other location to use your keywords is in links on other pages. Again, if a search engine sees that you've made a particular word into a link to a particular page, that word is probably relevant to the contents of the link's destination. (This gives rise to the phenomenon of 'Google bombing', where large numbers of websites use a certain phrase to link to a certain page, in order to affect Google's ranking for that phrase, often to make a political point.)

But one place it's (almost certainly) safe to ignore is the 'meta tag' for 'keywords'. Meta tags were intended as a means for the author to specify the words which were relevant to his or her page: but human nature being what it is, people just began to abuse them. It's widely accepted that Google - the only search engine which really matters - ignores them completely... so you can, too.

A final word of warning, though: don't overdo it. If the search engines think that you're guilty of 'keyword stuffing', they'll have no qualms excluding it completely from their databases. Plus, it makes for an appalling reading experience.

Tags: html, keywords, meta tags, search engine optimisation

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