Forget keywords meta-tag and think keyword density!

<meta name="Keywords" content="papayas, pears, peaches, plums, prunes, penguins and pomegranates">

Right! Now that I've told you from my keywords meta-tag what the rest of this article is going to be about, I want you to pretent to be a search engine or an editor of a directory. Have you decided yet where you will index this page? Fruits perhaps? The bird does throw you off a bit, doesn't it?

Well, in fact, it won't be throwing most search engines off, since they aren't that easily fooled. Like you, they are also reading this page and, like you are doing right now, are probably wondering just where all my keywords are going to appear, and you might also be wondering when I am going to stop blabbering and get to the point!

Keywords are words that you pick out, following some algorithms buried in your brain that you unconsciously use, to help decide just what this article's all about. The more I use a keyword in this text, the more inclined you might be to deduce that it might be one of the topics I am addressing. For instance, you know full well that I'm not talking about space travel, since I keep mentioning keywords and this contributes to the keyword density of this word within the context of this document..

What's also important to note, is that I am trying to keep you reading, and not just filling up the page with words like keyword, but using full sentences built around it. This means that I am probably actually writing something of value rather than merely trying to mislead any visiting search engine by keyword stuffing. Thus the density of these words within this text is rather believable, isn't it?

Yet another thing to note, is that I'm using the word in such a fashion as to try to focus your attention on it as you absorb all this text. At the same time, I am mentioning things like sentences, text, words, context, document - these are related words, and this served to help you decide on what this article was really all about.

Search engines use various methods of calculating what your webpages are all about, and no two algorithms are exactly the same. This is where quick-fix SEO (search engine optimization) methods cannot quite match up to the power of words and writing technique.

One thing that amuzes me, is the use of the "image alt-tag". In the parlance of my keywords meta-tag, I will now try to also use my image alt-tag to convince you (as well as any visiting search engine spiders) that this article is about penguins and fruit by showing you a picture of one lying under a tree surrounded by all the fruits in the world beginning with the letter "P":

(Right-click and view source to see my alt-tag for this image)

I somehow feel convinced that search engines don't take this tag too seriously either, as it can also be so easily abused. But I digress as I take the opportunity to blatantly advertise our search engine, misleading image alt-tags and all!

So even after ScollSpider (read about our crawler here) has visited your site, you can expect to find your pages indexed on keywords that hopefully best describe your pages. We'd like to give our searchers the most accurate search results we possibly can, and we calculate what we deem to be your keywords for this purpose, saving you the bother of adding a keywords meta-tag.

There's no harm in having a keywords meta-tag, and in fact you may actually use it to your advantage by way of using it as a compass for the actual content you are busy writing. For example, you might jot down target keywords you'd like to rank for so that visitors who find you via a search engine would find that what they were looking for actually resides in your page. Then build your content around those words, and try to put yourself in the visitor's shoes and decide whether they would find in your page exactly what they were searching for.

So is this article about papayas, pears, peaches, plums, prunes, penguins and pomegranates? Or is it about keywords and keyword density? Write great content, advertise yourself, and keep people coming back for more. As search engines develop more and more to give people what they're actually looking for, your excellent content will be finding its rightful place at the top of relevant search results.

Article written and supplied by Scolls, developer for www.WebWobot.com
15 December 2006