Keywords and Description

Keywords are quite literally the key to indexing your website for search engines. Most web pages have a list of keywords and a description attached to the top of the file. This info is held in what are called meta tags (there's more on this when you come to creating your home page).

Keywords may not be words at all, but phrases... The more specialised your site's subject is - the more specific it's keywords will be - the easier it'll be for it to get a good position in the listings. For example, if you sell sports shoes - it's better to have the keyword 'sports shoes' rather than 'shoes'.

When you submit your site to a search engine, it sends out a spider to index your pages. It looks in a number of places for information on the page contents:

• The 'keywords' meta tag
• The 'description' meta tag
• The page title
• Any comments in the page
• Any text attached to images ('alt' attribute)
• The actual text of the document.

A 'digested' form of the information the spider finds is returned to the search engine. Here your page is added to the database, indexed by it's keywords.

You need to start thinking about what your keywords should be: What will your customers be typing into search engines in order to find your website?

INFO: In the past, some webmasters have played a few 'dirty tricks' on the search engines... In order to get a higher ranking, they would include keywords thousands of times (sometimes in invisible text) and include 'off-topic' keywords (unrelated to the site's content.) The engines have got smart to this, consider this to be a form of spam, and will block the listing of any sites that do it.

Here is a list of rules your keywords list should obey:

• Make sure your keywords are as specific as possible.
• Try to avoid common or generic words.
• Make sure the list isn't too long - no more than 30 keywords.

The current thinking on finding the best keywords is this: You assess the demand, and supply for each set of keywords, and find the keywords with the best ratio of (highest) demand to (lowest) supply. These keywords should then give you the best chance of ranking highly in search engine results!

The best way of doing this is to create a spreadsheet (or database) with the columns: Keywords, Demand, Supply, Notes. You'd then start filling in the data by following this process:

• Pick some keywords, and enter them into the keywords column.
• Use either Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool or 7Search's similar tool to find the demand (i.e. how often the keywords were used for searches on Overture/7Search) for your keywords. Enter this value into the demand column.
• Using Google or another engine, enter the keywords, and see how many pages contain the sercah term (google says something like '3,000,000 pages found.)
• Enter any interesting info into the notes column - i.e. any potential competitors or allies.
• Constantly keep looking for alternative, more profitable keywords combinations. Merriam Webster's Online Thesaurus could help.
• Add any new ideas for keywords to the bottom of the list and continue.

Once you have determined the most 'profitable' keywords, you'd then create a website focussed around them. The Affiliate Master's Course (get it from the EBook Library explains the principles outline above in way more detail and you should read it...

WordTracker is a useful tool for finding the best keywords for your website...

It has an up to date database of all the keywords typed into a number of different search engines. It makes the process of finding the most profitable keywords much easier than doing it by hand. SiteSell have a similar tool (see the page on Web Site Builders).

Wordtracker offer a free trial so you can assess their service. Recommended.

I think there's a simpler, quicker way to find out if you should use certain keywords - I've not heard anyone else recommending this so let me know what you think...

I think it's more important to look at the quality of the results you get back...

Most engines are fairly hopeless at finding relevant results. Google returns the most relevant results for the keywords entered - that's the single reason why it has become sooo successful - because it works! Google gives people more of what they're looking for than any other engine...

Enter your ideal keywords into Google... Is the page filled with relevant results? If so - choose some other keywords. If not then there's a good chance you can get onto the first page of listings straight away!

The description meta-tag contains a brief synopsis of your site. It's the text that appears under the title in some search engine results.

The description should contain your most important keyword(s), and some text that's going to entice browsers to visit. Ensure you give as much relevant info about the site as you can in the description.

Your site description should:

• Contain your most important keywords.
• Be informative.
• Be a reasonable length (10-100 words)