Keyword Meta Tag

The information in the keywords Meta tag provides additional information for crawler-based search engines to index along with the actual content of your website. The third Meta tag shown in the textbox example near the beginning of this section, the one that says "name=keywords" is the keywords Meta tag.

The keywords Meta tag contains words or phrases that meet two criteria. First, the keywords are ones that you feel describe your business. Second, they are words that someone might enter into the search engine if they were looking for websites, such as yours, to learn about businesses or products. See an example of Keyword Selection by clicking on "Learn more". Assigning accurate and appropriate keywords to your website will encourage each search engine to place your website higher among its list of results it returns to the person performing the search.

Here are some tips for choosing keywords:

• To be most effective choose words and/or phrases that you have actually used on the pages of your website. Words that appear only in the keywords Meta tag, but not on any page, will not increase the ranking your page receives on search results listings. The text in the keywords Meta tag works in conjunction with the text on the actual web pages.
• Include words not on your web page, but that people may use in conjunction with other words already listed as a keyword and that are on the web page(s). An example may be helpful here. Let's say that you have a website for your farm market and you use the town it is located in for the address and directions you provide on the site. However, your farm market is within a half hour drive of a major city. Listing the name of the city in the keywords Meta tag may help people searching for farm markets in the vicinity of the city to locate yours. This is because using a location name in conjunction with what someone is looking for is one tactic for narrowing down the number of search results. Someone in Pennsylvania, for instance, is unlikely to be interested in farm markets in Oregon.
• List possible spelling variations. For instance, when searching for a corn maze people may spell maze either "maze" or "maize."
• Break words apart or put them together. As an example, some people may spell home grown as "home grown," "home-grown," or "homegrown."
• Include synonyms, Americanisms, and so forth. A website about cars might include the words cars, vehicles, automobiles, etc. as keywords.
• Aim for listing no more than 25 words or phrases, with each word or phrase separated by commas.

It is important to note that few search engine crawlers support the keywords Meta tag anymore. However, for the few that still do, your keywords may improve the ranking your website receives. Also, repeating a particular word too often in a keywords Meta tag could actually harm your page's chances of ranking well.

Websites, such as http://inventory.overture.com, allow you to see what terms people are using to perform searches. Using a website such as this one can assist you in determining what words and phrases your Meta tag keywords should include.