We all put our keywords in the keyword meta tags, even though we know that most modern spiders don't care. But there are things you can do that will hurt more than help. Spiders really don't like seeing the same keyword over and over. No word should be used as a keyword more than three times. Using "dog grooming" as an example, having your keyword list contain dog, dogs, dog grooming, grooming dogs, dog salon, and so forth is NOT a good idea. This is keyword spamming, which tends to irritate the spiderbots. If you can't think of a more varied list of words or phrases, then just keep it to a few relevant words. You also want to keep the total character count for keywords to no more than 120 or so.

With the sites that I manage, my experience is that if you use Keyword Meta Tags, each of those keywords should be included in the actual text on your homepage. For example, if your keyword meta tags include "dog grooming", "dogs", "pets", and "pet grooming", the text content on your homepage should include the same words or phrases. Doing this gives the spiderbots a "warm and fuzzy" feeling that your site is what you claim it to be. It does matter. On the other hand, including numerous words in your meta tags that aren't in your content is counterproductive. From the standpoint of the bots, it tends to bring into question what your site is really about. Bots like consistency. I saw this recently on a site I used to be associated with. They had 15-20 meta tag keywords that weren't reflected in the content. Their PR was 2 points below what it should be. I emailed them a few months ago about this and they started to take the advice. Their PR has gone up one point and I expect it will go up another.

KEYWORDS: Keywords are the relevant part of content. As pointed out in the previous paragraph, make SURE you have keywords relevant to your product or service in your content. Don't guess at this. Use the Google or Yahoo keyword selector tools. Find out what people are actually searching for and then include the words/phrases relevant to your site in your content.

While doing research for an ebook I recently published, I used the example of someone selling homemade candles online. Without using the tools, I came up with a list of what I THOUGHT the relevant keywords would be. I then used the tools to find out what people were actually searching for. Not to my surprise, my "best guess" list was wrong. The number one search in Yahoo related to candles was "yankee candles". I didn't even know what that was. Had I just used my own judgement I would have missed the number one search criteria. Use the tools.

If you offer something that some of your competitors don't, make use of that. For example, if you offer "discounts" for certain items, use that in your keywords. For instance, somewhere in your content you should have the phrase "discount yankee candles". You will still be in the Google/Yahoo results (somewhere) when someone searches for "yankee candles", but if you offer discounts, and they search for "discount yankee candles", your site will come up in the search results significantly. The same thing would apply to words such as "homemade", "decorative", "custom", and so forth. Try to find a competitive advantage that will help cull your site out from the rest.

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