Open source training & tutorials from experienced, passionate people
By A Web Design
In lesson 3 we took a look how and where keywords are added to an HTML page.
We also understood the reasons why keywords are needed in a webpage's HTML code. Apparently keywords impact a page's rank within a search engine (except for Google which simply ignores keywords).
Google believes that webmasters have abused keywords for very long by stuffing keywords where page viewers would not see them but search engine spiders would.
Hence Google no longer uses keywords as a judgement parameter to affect the page rank of a webpage within in their results page.
That said, Google is not the only search engine used by seekers of information via the Internet. Yahoo, Bing, MSN, Ask Jeeves and a ton of other search engines are also used.
While each of these search engines also penalize keywords stuffing in HMTL pages in different ways, apparently they do not ignore keywords altogether like Google does.
Let's look at different ways of choosing keywords for use in an HTML page.
Take a print out of the content of your website page.
Read your website's page content carefully. Keep a highlighter in your hand, highlight any word ( or small group of words ) within the content that seems to explain or represent what the page's content is all about.
Copy past these into an Excel spread sheet. Please keep one word or a select group of words ( i.e. no more than three to five words tops ) on a single line. The small group of words we shall call a key phrase
Take a step back and look for duplicates and / or any word(s) chosen that do not really fit correctly. Delete these. You will be left with a few key words and/or key phrases that truly represent the web page's content.
These then could be the keywords or key phrases that could be used between the <META name="keywords" content="{ place the keywords / key phrases here }" /> in your HTML code.
A great idea for identifying appropriate keywords is to take a look at the keywords used competitor's pages. To do this when the competing webs site page is open in any Browser, right click on the page, from the sticky menu that appears choose View Page Source.
Another Browser window will open in which the HTML source of the page will be displayed. Ctrl F normally opens a search window in this Browser window. In this search window enter META Keywords. The words META Keywords in the page source will be instantly located for you by the Browser.
Simply take a piece of paper and jot down the keywords or key phrases there. Better yet, copy these keywords or key phrases, one keyword / key phrase to a line, in an Excel spreadsheet for use later.
Repeat this process for about five or ten competitor websites that rate well in search engine's results page. Now you will have a nice list of keywords / key phrases appropriate to the domain your web pages belong to.
Do search / filter the keywords / key phrases captured to ensure that there are no duplicates in the Excel sheet.
Now you have a list of keywords / key phrases that your competitors are using in their pages that contain similar material. Check to see whether these keywords / key phrases also exist in your webspage's content. If they do ( and logically some or all should ) then you can use the very same keywords / key phrases within your <META name="keywords" content="{ place the keywords / key phrases here }" /> tags in your HTML page.
Often the question of If all webpages use the same or similar Keywords how does this particular page get a top page rank in the search engine, results page.
The absolutely honest answer to that question is that it does not. The use of proper keywords alone does not ensure top page rank in any search engine's results page.
Having said that the use of proper keywords does help the page rank better in most search engine's, except Google which simply ignores keywords when ranking pages.
Getting a high page rank in a search engine's results page requires a combination of various things to be done, in the right proportions for that web page.
We'll definitely be taking a close look at all that has to be done to improve a web page's ranking in a search engine's, result page in later tutorials.
This tutorial is essentially devoted to helping you get appropriate keywords for use on your web page.
In the next tutorial we shall take a look at various tools, both free to use and paid for, that help a great deal in choosing the right keywords blend for your web page.
Do notice that we are constantly referring to the term web page. Yes, this really means that appropriate keywords / key phrases need to be chosen and used with every page on the website, which must be made search engine friendly and not just the Gateway or Index page.
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