Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization “SEO” - Part 3

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Do Meta Tags, Keyword Density and Keyword Frequency Matter?

The short answer is a resounding YES! You’re probably thinking, “Come on Mike, does this really make a difference in the world of millions of websites?”. Here again, the answer is YES! You have to remember when I started this portion of our discussion about a week ago, there are a number of little things that you have to pay attention to that together, provide the results you want. Although these things may seem insiginificant in the scheme of things, they all add up to a proven and winning combination. Having said that, let’s move on to discussing the subject at hand.

Meta Tags

There are many people that will tell you that Meta tags don’t matter anymore and that most of the search engines don’t use them. My testing however has shown that even Google uses them not only for it’s indexing, but also for it’s directory listings. Overall they may not be as important as back links, but they still play a part in how the search engines list you and they do add relevance to how you get listed. It all comes down to keywords. My advice when it comes to meta tags is that you should place your top 5 - 10 keywords in not only your Meta Keyword section, but you should also include them in the Description for your site. So for example, the Meta information for this site is as follows:


meta name="description" content="Free Internet Marketing Tips discussing affiliate marketing programs, starting your own online business, home business programs, teen business, internet marketing strategies, Search Engine Optimization, business plans consultants, online small business marketing, secret business strategies, business opportunities, internet marketing blogging, Search Engine Marketing; Website promotion and internet advertising services, Starting your own internet business, website Linking, back Linking and reciprical links, Internet, marketing, house, home, business, internet marketing, strategies, tips, tricks, money, business, finance, wordpress, blogger, blogging"

meta name=”keywords” content=”internet marketing, internet marketing strategies, seo, search engine optimization, Free, marketing secrets, millionaire marketing methods”

Now you may be thinking that I have overloaded these meta tags, and you’re right I have. You should limit your keywords to about 160 characters because that’s about where the search spiders will stop looking, but I have found that allowing the search engine spiders to determine where they want to stop looking at the keywords is best for a site like this one where we are discussing a lot of different subjects. Now for a site where you are selling a specific product, idea, or service, you should only use a tight set of keywords so that your traffic is more targeted. The reason for this is because you want to have a high conversion rate on your sales and if you are using a lot of different keywords, your conversion rate will suffer because you may be getting traffic that has no intention of purchasing what you offer simply because you didn’t use the proper keywords, not only in your meta tags, but throughout your website content. So if this is your goal, then you definately don’t want a meta tag set to look like ours above.

Keyword Relevance

This brings us to the other subject of keyword relevance and keyword frequency. This plays an even bigger part in how well the search engines are going to rank your site than the meta tags do. Most, if not all search engines rank keyword frequency and relevance higher than they do the meta tag data so in terms of importance. In fact, this is proba bly one of the most important things you should be planning as you build your website.

What I suggest is that you pick approximately 10-20 keywords that tightly describe your product or service. You should be picking these keywords based off the following criteria. Who is your target market? What do they want? What are the likely keywords they will type in when they do a search for your kind of product or service? Are they young, old, rich or poor? Is your product localized to a particular demographic? If so then this will play a big part in the keywords you choose. I can’t emphasize enough on the importance and the time you should take in developing your keywords for your site. To get a good idea of what the most popular search terms, you will need to use a tool like Wordtracker Tour which gives you data you cannot get from the free online tools like Overture Search or Google Keyword Search. If you want the advantage over your competitors when it comes to keywords, Wordtracker Tour is the only way to go. This link will take you to the free tour and you will see what I mean. Wordtracker gives you keywords that show how many times it has been searched for by all the top search engines for the past 90 days and then also shows you how many competing websites there are that use the search phrases listed. None of the free tools will do this for you and you can actually Identify niches using Wordtracker that you wouldn’t be able to identify otherwise.

Once your keywords are identified you need to get them incorporated into your site, site headings, sub headings and in the content of the page. Your h1, h2 headings are so important when it comes to your keywords that you will want to make be sure they get placed there. The search engines place a pretty high relevance to your site based off the keywords in your headings so make sure they are present there. Likewise, the content of your site needs to have a certain amount of your keywords in order to be effective, which leads us to the issue of keyword frequency.

Keyword Frequency/Density

The rule of thumb here should be for every 100 words or text your keywords should be injected approximately 5 times. Now this rule of thumb isn’t set in stone and you really need to test your site to see what percentage works best. Since each site topic is different, it really just depends on the popularity of the keywords or subject matter of the site in question. In general however, this percentage seems to be a magic number and although it sounds easy enough to implement something like this, keeping your content flowing and readable, while implementing this kind of keyword frequency isn’t always easy. I do think that getting as close as you can to this number is important, I think the actual content is more important and you shouldn’t sacrifice the quality of your content for the sake of hitting these numbers, so keep that in mind as you build your site and it’s content.

Whatever you do, don’t keyword spam your site, you could ultimately get rejected by some search engines if they believe this is what you are doing so as I just mentioned, just keep your content flowing as you would normally and then analyze it to see if your keywords are close to the 5/100 rule. If it’s on the low side then see where you might increase it, if it’s on the high side then you may want to see if you can tone it down a bit.

The overall goal is to get search engine traffic and give yourself the best chances of ranking high, so let’s summarize what we’ve discussed:

• Research Keywords for a tight market segment using tools like Wordtracker Tour
• Ensure that your keywords are Relevant to your site, product or service.
• Populate your Meta description and Meta keyword tags with your keywords, but don’t overload it because it can dilute your conversion rate on sales.
• Maintain the 100/5 rule for your keyword frequency but ensure that your website content doesn’t suffer for the sake of the frequency rule.

I look forward to your feedback and or comments on this subject.

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