Why Go to All this Trouble for a Few Keywords?
The World Wide Web is the greatest information repository in the history of man. The world’s great libraries like the British Library and the National Archives are pee wee in comparison. Methods for finding things in this new information repository are still primitive and evolving. Today’s search engine spiders are surely a primitive precursor to more sophisticated cataloguing techniques (at least I certainly hope so). If you want your content to be a useful part of this great information repository, you’d better start getting good at selecting keywords that will be and are used to catalogue your pages.
Many people say they don’t have time to arrange their keywords carefully and submit their pages to search engines and directories. I posit that it is more important to get your pages listed properly than to create them in the first place. What’s the point in writing something and putting it on the Web if no one knows how to find it? Or if it’s hard to find? If you write the definitive resource for purple widgets because there is only crummy information available about purple widgets, you have wasted your effort if you don’t make sure people can find it.
You might say "well the spider’s will be around my site eventually and catalogue the whole thing anyway – I don’t need to do anything." There are two problems with this. First, spiders don’t necessarily index all your pages if they do come. Some spiders only go a couple of levels deep. Some spiders only index the first 400 pages they find. Some might not ever get to your pages at all. Also spiders are fairly clever but they cannot build an accurate summary of your pages and prepare a brief description of the contents without a little help from the page author. If you make no effort at all to help the spiders in their task, your pages will almost certainly be one of those that shows up as listing #21,567 when someone does a search. Your page may actually be the best on the Web about that subject but unless the search engine realizes your page is the most relevant, no one will ever know it. Your page should be in the top ten for that subject. For the most part, search engines and directories rank pages based on keyword occurrence levels and relevance. You want the most relevant keywords that describe your content to be in the places search engines look for them. If they are not, your pages probably will not be well ranked. It’s really as simple as that.
So why don’t you just put a bunch of keywords in the meta tags on the first page of your site that describes what the whole site is about? You could load up the meta tags with a whole bunch of words that cover everything in your site. First of all search engine spiders and directories will penalize your rankings or punish you by not listing you at all if you have keywords listed in your meta tags that are not actually on the visible page. If you have ‘apple pie’ in your meta tag keywords and your page only has a link to your fruit or baking section the page will not be returned highly when people search on ‘apple pie’.
Suppose does a search on ‘apple pie’ from InfoSeek for example and you listed ‘apple pie’ in the meta tags of your main site page only. The relevancy of ‘apple pie’ on your main page will be quite low compared to many other pages on the Web that have more apple or pie mentions on the page. So when searching for ‘apple pie’ your page will come up something like #12,229 if at all. If people actually do come to it they won’t find anything about apple pie on it. They will have no way of knowing you might have such an article somewhere on your site.
But if you have carefully prepared the keywords for your actual apple pie page, that particular page is going to compare quite well with other pages on the Web about apples and pie and you will come out near the top of the list. And you will have a much better chance of getting visitors. You have to accept the fact that people will enter your site in odd places with very narrow interests and start designing your sites to that reality.
Another thing to remember: optimizing your pages for search engines and directories will not only get you more traffic now, the effects will last for a long, long time. The new traffic will keep on growing for years.
