Using key phrases for successful listing with search engines

You cannot usually control the exact search engine position your site ends up with, but making sure that your key words and phrases are optimised can have a positive effect.

Over the past year, many search engines have introduced fees for registration or Pay-Per-Click options, paid inclusion, sponsored listings and keyword buys, which will affect positioning. Some still do offer free listings.

Search Engines are constantly running software called 'robots', 'spiders' or 'crawlers' that read entire web sites and update the index entries for that specific Search Engine. They check for the number of times keywords or phrases are used within a piece of text. When the search engine gets a search request for a particular word or phrase it draws up a list of sites based on a keyword relevancy score.

Why is this important?

It is important to try to get your website listed near the top of the search engine list – most people will not search beyond two or three pages of suggested websites.

What are keywords and keyphrases

These are the words users enter into search engines to find web pages with content they are looking for. Key words should always be two or more words, in other words, key phrases. If you only use single keywords you are likely to get lost in the crowd. For example, if you have a site that specializes in 'antique pine furniture', list that as a keyword phrase instead of listing each word ie: antique, pine, furniture. It is not likely that someone looking for 'antique pine furniture' is going to type in just 'furniture' into their search. Can you imagine all the sites that would come up if that were the case? Be specific with your keyword phrases. Put yourself in the place of the person doing the search. What words are they likely to type in as their search?

You can link to
Overture.com Search Suggestion
which gives lists of keywords and phrases people have used in the last month for searching for specific topics and the number of times these phrases have been used. Enter a phrase that you think people will search for and see what other related phrases come up.

Choose common descriptive words – try to think up 10 phrases or more. Do not assume that people will know the name of the company they are searching for. Remember - most people will use more than one word to search to enable them to get more accurate results.

You do not need a huge string of keywords. The search engine will not read all of them. The standard is 1024 characters. The spaces between your keywords also count as a character. Don't use spaces, use commas to separate your keywords. Select your keywords very carefully, and arrange them in order of importance.

How can I maximise my search engine listings?

Submit the main content pages of the website to the search engines and bias each page towards a different key phrase or topic to give more chance of being found in the listings. For instance, your site may have the following main topic pages – News – Products – Services - Don't fill keywords tags for these sections with every word you could use, give a narrower unique set to each section. This means any page can be a point of entry to the site and you have several points of entry – giving your site more chance of being found by a customer.

Where should keywords and phrases be placed on my website?

The most important place is within the html title tags on each page.

Search engines display the text located between the tags in the results listings. The title should use key phrases which are descriptive of the site.

example:

title - Johnson Joiners Limited home page
(this does not tell potential customers about Johnsons)

This would get much better results:
title -Johnson Joiners Limited, makers of high quality pine furniture, come and visit our website and see our extensive range

Body text, titles and headings

Keywords/phrases should be placed in the body text of a page, especially in the first paragraph. There should be repetitions of keywords here – between 5 and 10 if possible.

The first paragraph should be heavy with keywords, but still be readable and understandable. Work the keywords in so it sounds natural for them to be there.

They should also be in the page title and any headings. Some search engines also read 'alt tags' for images, so these should include at least one key phrase.

If you fail to add your key phrases to your title tag and in the text on your page, then your ranking with the search engines will be low, no matter how may keywords you have.

What are meta tags and how are they used?

They are content in a web page that the search engines can see but are not usually seen by the user when the page is viewed on the Internet.

Meta tags are useful in getting better listings in the search engines. However, some search engines ignore them. Include meta tags in your document for the engines that do use them. It can increase your rating.

There are many, different meta tags. The ones you need to use are the 'description' and 'keyword' tags.

The description tag provides a summary which appears when your page comes up on a search. Without this 'description' the search engine will create one. It will generally use the first few lines of text at the top of your page.

The keywords tag is where you list your keyphrases.

Meta tags are not a magic solution to getting listed. Using meta tags along with other methods, such as having a content rich site, can help boost your ranking in the major search engines.

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