More on Choosing Keywords And How to Use Them

Here are details on some other subjects that affect the use of keywords in your web pages.

Commas

Many believe that they should include as many keywords as possible in their meta keywords tag. This is far from being true. By leaving out commas, or leaving out spaces, you gain room for more words. For example, here's how meta tags are typically written:

That's 29 characters, including spaces, between the quotes after content=. But some people leave out the commas:

By removing the commas, the content portion of the keywords tag is now 27 characters in length. That's two characters saved. If there are a lot of keywords in the tag, these saved characters can add up into enough saved space for several additional words. Another method to save space is to stick with the commas but to leave out the spaces:

Same amount of space (27 characters). This style has developed because some people want to save space but thought it was important to still retain the commas.

The official specifications say only that elements should be separated by commas. However, it's up to each search engine to implement the tags as they see fit. The search engines say you don't need to use the commas. So you can do create your tags any way you wish.

Keyword Count

Don't be fooled into thinking that more is better. If your web page is about growing apples, having the keyword fruit in your meta tag is not suddenly going make it come up when people search for fruit. By adding some extra words like pie or farm in your metatag may help you appear when someone searches for apple pie or apple farm, even if you don't mention them in the text of your page. Your page is already focused on apples, so these extra keywords work in conjunction with that keyword.

Tag Length

There is no standard size for either the keyword or description meta tags. Generally, search engines will accept about 1,000 characters for the keywords tag and about 200 characters for the description tag. Your tags can be longer, and going over the limit does not mean that your tag will be discarded. It just means that the search engines will not use any text beyond their chosen limits.

Spamming

Infoseek used to say that using a keyword seven times in a meta tag would disqualify the tag. This was dropped in Sept. 1996. Infoseek no longer specifies the exact amount. Nor do any of the other search engines specify an amount. When search engines warn against repetition, they generally mean blatant spamming attempts such as this:

There's is absolutely no reason for the word "apple" to appear so many times. In contrast, the tag below is not a spamming attempt:

Although "apple" is repeated many times in the above tag, there's a legitimate reason to repeat it so many times. This is done in order to preserve keyword phrases. It is best for words to appear in your tags exactly as someone might enter them into a search. (We'll go into this in more detail below). Although the above tag is legitimate, the repetition may still cause a search engine to look poorly upon it. Infoseek, for example, has shown a tendency to downgrade a page the more often a word is repeated in its tag.

Phrasing of Keywords

Here are three example of keyword metatags:

If a search engine user enters "apple farming", which metatag is most likely be found higher in a search engine listing? The last one, because the words "apple farming" appear in near proximity to each other as they do in the search words. The lesson here is, if you anticipate people searching for keyword phrases, put keyword phrases into the keywords metatag of your web page. They will be seen as phrases (word sets) by most of the search engines, not just as a string of unrelated words.

Maximizing Keywords

Maintaining phrases (to maximize the use of the keywords) while avoiding the problem of repeating the keywords too often, is the goal of all webmasters. For example, consider this keyword metatag:

Obviously you would want to preserve as many of the important keyword phrases in use here as possible, yet reduce the repetition of keywords to avoid having the page being labeled as spamming. By properly arranging the keyword parts, we can incorporate all of the phrases compactly and logically:

Here we see that the use of the term "fish" has dropped from seven to three, and we still maintain all these highlighted terms:

selling fish food raising fish farmers feeding fish tanks
selling fish food raising fish farmers feeding fish tanks
selling fish food raising fish farmers feeding fish tanks
selling fish food raising fish farmers feeding fish tanks
selling fish food raising fish farmers feeding fish tanks
selling fish food raising fish farmers feeding fish tanks
selling fish food raising fish farmers feeding fish tanks
selling fish food raising fish farmers feeding fish tanks
selling fish food raising fish farmers feeding fish tanks

Metatag Order

There are webmasters that are convinced that meta tags must appear in a particular order. There are also those that believe that the title tag must come before everything in the head area. These beliefs even caused Microsoft to erroneously issue a product support article relating to meta tag positioning and FrontPage. It stated:

Symptom: Some search engines rank your content lower in the search results than you expect.

Cause: This behavior occurs because some of the FrontPage templates place the <title> tag below the <meta> tag. Some search engines expect to find the <title> tag before the <meta> tag. Therefore, some search engines rank your content lower if the <title> tag is found after the <meta> tag.

This is absolutely incorrect. Microsoft did not report this because the search engines reported it to them, but rather they are merely parroting back what the average user believes to be the case. They are all wrong. The major search engines are not expecting the title tag to come first, nor for the meta tags to appear in any particular position.

Capitalization

Webmasters spend a lot of time wrestling with capitalization in their keyword metatags. This is because some search engines are case-sensitive in regards to term matching, (i.e. "Entertainment" will bring up different results than a search for "entertainment.")

Webmasters have started creating metatags like:

entertainment, Entertainment, ENTERTAINMENT

The problem with this is that these repetitions may trip a search engine's spam detector, especially when dealing with phrases. As an example, these variations for "golf courses" could trigger a spam alarm:

golf courses, Golf courses, Golf Courses, golf Courses, GOLF COURSES, GOLF courses, golf COURSES

So how should you approach this problem? Just stick with lower case terms. This is because virtually everyone searches in lower case (using the shift key is too tedious for most users). Also only two search engines are completely case sensitive, so the work involved and the risk of spamming is not worth the bother.

Case Sensitivity Chart

This chart shows whether each search engine is case sensitive. Since some search engines may match a mixed case (BuenaVista, NeXt) or other case variation, different case types are also listed. "All" means that all cases are matched, despite the case entered. "Exact" means that only the exact case is matched.

Type	AV	IS	NL	HB	EX	LY	WC
Case Sensitive?	Yes	Yes	Mixed /Title	Mixed	No	No	No
Lower Case buenavista	all	all	all	all	all	all	all
Upper Case BUENAVISTA	exact	exact	all	all	all	all	all
Mixed Case BuenaVista	exact	exact	exact	exact	all	all	all
Title Case Pacific Coast Pacific Coast Hwy	exact	exact*	exact	all	all	all	all
Sentence Case Buenavista Pacific coast	exact	exact	exact	all	all	all	all

* Two adjacent words capitalized on the first letter produces a phrase search with Infoseek.

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