Help me to choose keywords and Description

[born2win]

Hi Friends,
I was building a new website. I planned to give relevant meta description and keywords for each page instead of copying the same keyword and meta for all pages. I am not targetting too much keywords just two keywords per page. Can I choose the targetted keyword and also some keywords from the text content of the page into the keyword and description.
i.e. I have a webpage of 300 characters with explanation of a product. I am targetting two keywords for that product and If I put just only the two keywords in the meta keyword section wont be nice. So I planned to choose some more keywords from the content of that webpage. Is it acceptable by the search engines or have any problem.

[ocinternetadv]

Hi Born2win,

First of all, 300 words on a page is great, just make sure they are not copied off the manufacturer's site or any other web page, as many of the bots now have "duplicate text" included in their algorithm.

Second, if the page is relatively new, I recommend only using one keyword per page. Too many of your competitors will dominate you if get too carried away in the beginning.

Your Title

Your title should be 65 characters or less. I highly recommend starting the title with the keywords. If you absolutely MUST use more than one keyword on a page, then use the magical pipe symbol to separate them. IE: "Indian IT Support | IT Networking in India - XYZ Company".

Your Description

Yahoo! now truncates your description if it starts with the keywords, Google pretty much ignores your description all together. I'd still start with it anyway because my sites are doing great and most start with the keywords int he description. Just make sure the description is under 150 characters and contains your keywords in sequence.

ScrubTheWeb.com has a fantastic tool you can use to analyze your SEO, title, Meta, keyword prominence, density, and proximity. I like that it gives me a "spider's view" of what my page looks like. I also have WebPosition , but for what you're looking to do, STW should be just fine.

Best of Luck!

[canadafred]

Google pretty much ignores your description all together.

pretty much : altogether
wishy : washy

I am curious to read how you support this position. Do you have anything credible to back this statement? something based on fact? or are you just slinging SEO advice around based on what someone once told you they heard from a cousin's second husband's aunt?

[stymiee]

Hi Friends, I was building a new website. I planned to give relevant meta description and keywords for each page instead of copying the same keyword and meta for all pages. I am not targetting too much keywords just two keywords per page. Can I choose the targetted keyword and also some keywords from the text content of the page into the keyword and description. i.e. I have a webpage of 300 characters with explanation of a product. I am targetting two keywords for that product and If I put just only the two keywords in the meta keyword section wont be nice. So I planned to choose some more keywords from the content of that webpage. Is it acceptable by the search engines or have any problem.

You won't have any problems because the search engines don't use Meta tags in their ranking algorithms. The keyword tag is virtually useless. The description tag is not, however. True, it won't help your site rank any better, but Google and MSN will use your Meta description as your page's description in the SERPs. (Actually, they will use the description from dmoz.org's directory unless you don't have one or use the NOODP meta tag).

So, it's good that you want to put unique meta tags on each page. It is a good thing. But I want to make sure you don't expect it to have any kind of affect on your rankings. If so, you'll have a big let down which would be a shame.

[ocinternetadv]

Thanks for the reply.

I changed the description on the several of Questinc.com's pages last year to determine if that particular meta tag made a difference in ranking. So long as I kept the keyword density of the page relative, the description didn't make a difference and the ranking did not change.

However, it's still a good practice to utilize the description meta to include your keywords because as you see in the search results, Google does display the contents of the tag to the searcher (bolding the keywords as well).

Cheers,
Steve

[ocinternetadv]

Well put John.

[rohoni]

Select the right keywords and phrases Go to wordtracker.com or the overture suggestion tool to find the most popular words and phrases that suit the theme of your web site.
Weave these words and phrases into your meta tags (title, description and keyword tags), web copy (particularly the first 200 words of your web page) and links (i.e. if your site is called seoservicesgroup.com and you have a page for successstories, name the link www.seoservicesgroup.com/successstories.html instead of www.seoservicesgroup.com/faq.html .
Optimize each web page with different keywords. Visitors can then enter your site from different pages, depending on what keyword they entered in the search engines.