Search Engine Marketing and Optimization Solutions

RSS Subscription

Subscribe to the Simple SEM RSSFeed

Ebook/Newsletter

Enter Your email to receive the new Paid Search 101 EBook and SEM Newsletter

19
Nov

Keywords Can Make or Break Your Websites’ SEO

Posted in SEO

Some of the best web sites with extensive information and product listings do not even break the top 100 on search engine results pages due to the way the data is structured on the site. The titles and headers of the page may give little clue to the amount of information contained in the page, or its type and quality. There may be no description listed in the meta tags, and no keywords in the code. Important keywords that would lead interested users to the page are not present in the titles, or only found buried in the text deep into the many paragraphs on the page. Keywords can make or break your web site because they are what users actually type into the search engines to sift data. If your specialized keywords, main keywords, and synonym keywords are all present on every page, then there is much more of a chance that that page will be found by a user. Black Hat techniques have long used this trick to bury long lists of keywords in microscopic text sizes that match the color of the page background and are only read by browsers in search engines. White Hat techniques seek to redesign a web site based on SEO by doing keyword analysis, and subtly refining a site to optimally reflect user keyword queries.

The importance of keywords is further reflected in the prevalence and popularity of “cloud tags”. Cloud tags contain list of keywords arranged into small text boxes that reflect the type of information present on the site. Cloud tags may be static or evolving based upon user patterns, search queries, link choices, or other variables. Some have suggested that cloud tags are a re-branding of the most effective Black Hat SEO techniques with good design practices and user community base. Other ways that keywords can make or break a site relate to keyword density. Some sites such as Google will now also evaluate the keyword density of web pages as part of their analytic services or search ranking algorithms. Cloud tags have the effect of increasing keyword density throughout a site, making them popular with web masters, while users enjoy the expressive nature of the cloud tags and using keywords to attract members with similar interests to their home pages and blogs. Keywords in meta tags, titles, text, and cloud tags will ensure that search engines rank your sites pages in the right categories for users.