You may have heard web-designers or website owners mention words such as 'meta tags' or 'keywords' and waffle on about their importance... But what are they, and why are they important to you? This article explains the basics.

What is a Meta Tag?

A Meta Tag is simply a piece of information hidden within the coding of your web-page that contains information about the page itself. There are many different meta tags, each containing information about a particular aspect of a page. Typical information contained within the meta tags are:

Meta tags do not affect the display of your web page but are used by the software or hardware your visitors use to view your website. Meta tags are used in this way to enable the software to display your page correctly.

What are Keywords?

The 'Keywords' and 'Description' meta-tags are particularly important due to the fact that search engines use them to catalogue the information contained within your web-pages. This means that inserting the correct keywords into your meta-tags can make a big difference to your ranking within search engine results.

Getting the right number of keywords, a balance between specific and more generalised terms and the keyword density within the actual text of your web-pages is an essential part of the design process. As your site develops it may be necessary to 'tweak' your keywords as part of your Search Engine Optimisation.

As you should already know keywords contained within your web sites' meta tags are extremely important in allowing search engines to determine the content of your web pages. In order to make sure that these keywords are bringing your site up within Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) and driving visitors to your site, the most important factors in determining your keywords are:

Relevance

All your keywords should ALWAYS be relevant to the content within the page they describe. Adding keywords to your site just because they are commonly searched for words is not recommended. Not only will it frustrate visitors who are looking for other information, but it may well get your site blacklisted from search engine rankings.

Highly relevant keywords will attract visitors who are actually interested in the products and services your web site offers. At the end of the day, it is better to attract fewer visitors who actually have an interest in your web site than it is to attract more visitors who leave immediately.

Choosing Keywords people search for

Although your keywords should all be relevant, sometimes it is best not to be too specific.

For example, a once discovered a new fossil (honest!), it was new to science was named, a paper written on it and published. No web page was dedicated to it, but if you had the most used keyword and most relevant word would have been the fossils name (Trypanites fosteryeomani). You might therefore think that it would be sensible to use this as one of the most important keywords... However, that would (at least to start with) have been wrong. No one else has ever heard of this fossil, so it is very unlikely that anyone would ever type its name into a search engine. And sure enough, a quick check shows that there wasn't a single search for this term within a particular, popular search engine.

You would therefore need to be more generic with your choice of keywords. The fossil itself was a trace fossil of a worm from the Jurassic, so keywords/phrases such as 'fossil', 'trace fossil' or 'worm trace fossil' may be more successful.

There are several tools available that allow you to check the number of times a particular word or phrase has been searched for. It is important to choose keywords that are regularly searched for and these tools can help in this decision. It is also worth including common mis-spellings of your most relevant keywords as your competitors may not have thought of this when choosing their keywords.

Choosing keywords without too much competition

The section above may lead you to believe that choosing very generic keywords is your best bet as they are often searched for. However, if you get too generic in your choice of keywords then you will be competing with many more web sites for the top spots in the SERPS.  If we go back to our fossil example we can see what I mean. A quick search in Google brings up the following numbers of results:

As you would expect, the more generic we get, the more results we get. It can be seen then that choosing the best keywords is a matter of balancing the number of times the keywords are searched for against the number of other sites competing for rankings with those keywords. The best keywords will be those that are searched for often but have few competing sites (assuming the keywords are relevant to your content).

I find that it is best to have a balance between the generic and specific keywords relating to your web page and using key-phrases is a useful way of achieving this. In this way the entire key-phrase can be specific to your particular page, but the individual words within it are fairly generic.

e.g. Affordable Website Design London (4 generic keywords to create a specific key-phrase)

To summarise, choosing keywords is an essential part of producing a successful web site. Your keywords need to be highly relevant to the content of your page and specific enough to reduce competition. They also need to contain some generic keywords that are often searched for. As always, the single most important factor is relevancy and good content to go with the keywords.