We often get asked about our experiences with SEO, usually about what worked for us and what didn’t. Keywords are a topic that come up again and again. The video above comes from Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, and it neatly summarises the fact that when it comes to Google’s main search product, meta keywords are completely ignored.
That should be the end of that then. But it isn’t.
A lot of people seem to get mixed up between keywords and meta keywords, thinking they are exactly the same thing, so the video above might be taken by some people to mean that ALL keywords are ignored by Google. That just isn’t the case.
The word “keywords” can mean many things interchangeably, but for the purposes of this blog post, let’s refer to a set of keywords as the most important words, phrases or acronyms that your potential visitors will use to find a particular page of content on your site.
For these potential visitors to find your page, the keywords they use, or their synonyms or related keywords will have to appear on or pointing to the page somewhere. These keywords can appear in:
- the body text of your page
- the URL of the page, including the domain name
- the page title of the page
- the meta description of the page
- the H1 tag on the page
- the alt text of images on the page
- the links to the page
And that’s just off the top of my head. They can also still appear in your meta keywords, even if Google currently chooses to ignore them THERE.
You should still be doing your keyword research for each page (or set of pages) and using those keywords you identify as being the most important in the page elements listed in the paragraph above. Google even offer some good free tools to help you find out what keywords to use. I’d recommend Google’s Search Insights, Google Analytics, their free AdWords Keyword Tool, and even Google Trends. Add your own favourite keyword research tools in the comments below.
