By A Web Design

META Keywords - What they do for S.E.O

META Keywords used within an HTML page are handled differently by Google when compared to how all the other search engines handle them.

Let's take a look at how Google handles META Keywords - In one word - Google ignores META Keywords, but then Google is not the only search engine used on the Internet.

A lot of the other search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, Bing, Ask Jeeves (and a host of others) still pay attention to the META Keywords used on the web page.

So what are META Keywords? They are keywords especially chosen to help describe the contents of the web page.

The META Keywords always appears between the <head> </head> tags in an HTML page?

Do take a quick look at the example below:

<html>

<head>

<title> The page title contents are placed here </title>
<meta name="description" content="Free Web tutorials" />

<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript"/>

<meta name="author" content="Ivan Bayross And Meher Bala" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" />

</head>

<body>

</body>

</html>

In the above HTML code the words HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript that are values to the meta parameter content are an example of META Keywords.

It would definitely help to have these keywords sprinkled strategically within the page's content as well.

It's also a great idea to enclose these keywords within the tags within the page content so that when a search engine is crawling through and indexing that page's content the search engine spider ( i.e. the technique that search engine's use to index a page ) registers the link between the keywords used within the META Tags and identical words sprinkled sensibly within HTML page content.

It's really not necessary to use the around every single occurrence of a keyword within page content. This would make the page look terrible. However, must be used he strategically to enhance / emphasize keywords used within page content.

For example the first time a keyword is used within page content it can be boldfaced all other occurrences of the same keyword could be of normal font weight.

Hence, If you take care of keywords used within the META Tag and within page content and display a link between these two entities you are applying standard S.E.O techniques to the HTML page. The application of sound / sensible S.E.O techniques to a web page helps it rank higher in a search engines, result's page listings.

In the next tutorial we'll take a look at how to choose and use appropriate META Keywords in an HTML page.