by John Dow

Meta name keywords (also know as meta tag keywords) don't hold the weight they used to in the past with the major search engines. Meta name keywords have lost what value they once had but can still cause you problems if misused.

Many webmasters abused the meta name keywords in the beginning a forced the search engines to change their weighting of the keywords meta tag. Many all but eliminated the value. Some smaller engines still use the information but many don't.

However, even the ones who no longer place a value on them so to speak will penalize for a keyword listed that is not contained in the content. So now you won't necessarily get any value but sure could get some negative results.

All of the meta names (meta tags) should be unique to each web page and it's content. Especially the title and description tags. Using the same title and description on every page on your website will cause you pages to be ranked poorly or not at all. Always make sure that the title and description accurately match the content of the page.

If you are trying to optimize your web page for specific content, try and drill down to very specific terms or phrases. Instead of using a phrase like dog training, go a little deeper to hound dog training or guard dog training. If dog training is your general subject matter, make several pages on the many aspects of dog training. Don't just use dog training on each web page meta tags, use the more specific terms.

This helps the search engines track and rank your page according to the specific term rather than the general term. That means more targeted visitors for you and better search results for the search engines to provide. And the user will be better served too.

You really need a minimum of 4 different pieces of information in your head section of each web page. These serve to inform the search engines of the nature and subject, with the title and description used for display for the listing shown the searcher.

<Head>

<TITLE>Your page title here</TITLE>

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keywords">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Description of web page content.">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL">

</Head>

So your listing in the search engine would look like this:

Your page title here
Description of web page contents,
description continued on this line
www.yourdomain.com/ - 26k - Cached - Similar pages

You can easily see how important the title and description tags are since that's what is displayed on your listings. Those are two lines you want to interest the potential visitor to click on to learn more. So both tags are important to let the search engines know what your web page is about, and also attract visitors.

The robots tag is important to tell the search engines whether to index the page and if to continue to review other pages. There are instances where you do not want to index the web page based on the content (like download pages, information that is not related to subject matter, etc.).

As mentioned above, the meta name keywords is not so important to the search engines due to the abuse by webmasters putting keywords that don't match the pages content but are popular search terms. They try and trick the search engines to provide more traffic but the visitors don't see what they expected. Not a good thing for the search engines or visitors.

But you can still use the keywords meta name to help to track and categorize subject matter for your own purposes. It's a good idea not to try and cover too much ground on any one web page but to split the information up in sub categories. This allows more detailed and in depth information to be indexed and found by searchers.

The more detailed subject matter will not have as much competition and offer more information. All the single and double word phrases are so competitive that it's difficult for any new web page to rank well, regardless of content quality.

The bottom line is you can use the meta name keywords to help you organize and track subject matter. Don't optimize for too many keywords, don't list keywords that don't exist in the content, and don't depend on the major search engines to put any weight on the terms for ranking.

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