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SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION) ARTICLES
Keyword Voodoo! Invisible Metatag Mumbo Jumbo
by
Mike Banks Valentine
Search Engine Optimization clients often ask about
secret keywords as if there is some sort of Keyword
Voodoo that only Search engine optimization specialists
understand. Rather than simply using keywords
liberally in page text, web site owners seem to
believe if they use them in thos invisible meta
tags, that it will improve their ranking for keywords
that aren't on the visible part of the page.
Clients attempt to use site-wide keywords that
reference all the products they sell from every
page on the site! This widely misunderstood tactic
actually hurts ranking rather than helping it.
Here's an easy rule of thumb. If the keyword isn't
in the page body text in the single page you are
looking at, don't use it in any meta tags.
If you feel you must use the keyword in meta tags,
then you must also insert it into the visible
page text. Not into images or their alt tags,
not in title attributes, not in directory names
or image names, IN BODY TEXT. If you ignore this
recommendation, you dilute relevance of any keywords
that ARE in body text. Start on the page!
Clients get caught up in arcane minutia of SEO
worrying over details that they don't understand,
taken out of context from articles they've seen
or arguments they've read in discussion lists.
A litany of questions ensues.
Am I better off with generic keywords or brand
specific keywords? Do I make special landing pages
with targeted keyword phrases, or better yet,
keyword domains focusing only on specific keywords?
Do I put my best keywords all over the page or
put them at the top for more relevance? Should
I use those important keyword phrases in a title
tags even if they aren't on the page? How about
comment tags, alt text tags, noframes tags, and
noscript tags?
If you insist on believing in meta tag voodoo,
I suggest that you concentrate on the no voodoo
meta tag. <novoodoo>
For those of you who actually want to rank well
in the search engines for your important keyword
phrases, and who don't want to spend time burning
candles, chanting incantations and poking keyword
pins into voodoo dolls, I suggest you learn the
simplest of all SEO rules.
Put your keywords in the text on your web page!
If the keywords aren't already included within
the body text of your web site in sufficient density,
then it won't matter what HTML tags you use or
where you put them.
Often clients react with intense surprise when
I tell them that the keywords they are targeting
are nowhere to be found on their home page and
we need to add them. One surprised site owner
pointed to the graphic images across the top and
bottom of their pages where keyword phrases loomed
in giant stylized type across the page.
They asked about the menu bar along the left of
their site template, "You know, those that
change color as you hover your mouse over them?"
Sorry, those are images. The solution is NOT in
the images with words painted on them by fancy
graphics programs, but in real body text.
Here’s a quick test I recommend to clients.
Visit your site home page online. Go to the browser
menu, choose "Edit" and then "Select
All". This highlights all text on the page.
Then go again to the browser menu, again choose
"Edit" then click on "Copy",
which will copy that highlighted text to your
clipboard. Now open up Notepad from your Windows
"Start" menu by choosing the "Programs",
then "Accessories" and finally "Notepad".
When the blank page of Notepad text editor opens,
paste the text you've copied from your page into
it by going to the Notepad menu bar, choosing
"Edit" then "Paste".
Many who don't do their own design work are startled
by how few words of text actually appear when
doing this little test. This serves as a wake-up
call when they experience this demonstration and
begin to come to an understanding that this text
is all the search engines see, or care about.
This text shows clearly that not everything that
you can see on the page is actual text. Much of
it is made up of images with stylized text painted
on to them by a graphics program. What you see
on that Notepad page now is your visible body
text. That text that you now have in front of
you is all that matters to the search engines.
They don't care about the images or invisible
Voodoo meta tags.
Even then, surprised clients blurt, "We included
those keywords in the invisible HTML code on the
page lots of times in special (Voodoo) meta tags
our developer used."
Entrepreneurs often hire developers based on stellar
client lists or personal recommendations from
partners or even staff members, but search engine
optimization is rarely understood to be among
the skill sets needed within web design jobs.
SEO is done only by specialist Keyword Voodoo
practitioners that come in later to save site
owners from "invisible HTML tags" haunting
their keyword-less pages.
What do SEO's do? Add the keywords to the body
text - FIRST, before anything else is done. There
are clearly additional things we do as well, but
the path to highly ranked web pages is not in
the HTML that you CAN'T see, it is right in the
body text of the page in the form of visible words
on the page.
-------------------------------------------------------
Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization
Specialist practicing ethical SEO for Online businesses
http://SEOptimism.com
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