By placing keywords into a meta element within your documents (a common practice), you enable search engines looking for this information to catalog your keywords quickly. Keywords can help with ranking because you are able to catalog your site based on descriptive words or series of words that define your site as well as reflect the kind of word combinations that users will be inputting into search engines:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”indometric, indometric.com, html, xhtml, css, design, web design, development, web development, php” />

Unfortunately, this method, while easy to implement (just add as many keywords as you’d like, separated by commas, to the meta element), has been misused over time. Instead of sticking to those keywords relevant to their sites, some unscrupulous but imaginative folks decided to add keywords to a site that might have nothing to do with its relevance.

For example, say you’re working for a site that sells baby clothing and related items, and the person doing the meta keywords adds in words such as “sex” or “porn”—completely irrelevant and inappropriate for your site. Because sex-related keywords remain extremely popular search words, they often end up where they shouldn’t be.

Another unscrupulous bit is the addition of multiple instances of important words numerous times so that in a keyword value, the word “baby” might appear alone (rather than in various reasonable combinations) 100 times.

Search engines got savvy to this behavior and put their foot down by creating stricter rules and sometimes blocking any sites that were using poor practices.

This action has actually helped many working in Web development to be more aware of exactly the kind of keyword and keyword combinations they want. A good exercise is to sit down at your computer with a text editor at the ready,
and just begin to write out words and word combinations that might be things you would search for if looking for the given product or service your Web site represents.

You may also wish to have other members of your team add to the list. You can even ask people who useWeb sites but do not necessarily know anything about making them to come up with keywords and keyword combinations. Collect, review, and edit these down to the most descriptive and relevant options for use on your site.

While repeating a single keyword on its own within the meta element is considered a no-no, using the keyword in various combinations is not. For example, I might use “Web design” and follow it up with “Web development” and “Web usability.” I’ve used the word “Web” three times but in relevant, applicable ways. This helps with ranking and clarifying the types of work you do.

Another important means of refining keywords within your site is to match your keywords to actual data reported via the search engine in use on your site (if you have a search engine, that is). Many search applications provide reporting services so you can see your top requested searches and add terms to your meta element as necessary. Figure aboive shows a listing of search entries on KeywordCountry.com. I can see that there are several instances of suitable terms to add to my meta element, such as “laptop.”

Learn more about KeywordCountry here:

• How to Build Traffic
• How to Optimize Internal Webpages
• External Optimization Tricks
• Content that Search Engines Love
• Get Ideal content for websites