"Unique" Keyword Meta Data... How "Unique" Is "Unique"?

[ASpaventa]

I'm redoing our company website and I'm working on the meta data right now... specifically that of the KW data. I know these keywords need to be unique, but how unique?

For example, I have the phrases "tax solutions", "tax solution", & "tax debt solutions."

Experience tells me to nix the singular "tax solution" and use "tax solutions" since "tax solution" is within "tax solutions." But does this also hold true for "tax debt solutions" becuase it has both "solution" and "solutions" in it? Is "tax debt solutions" the silver bullet for all 3?

Also, for KW phrases that are similar, like "tax debt help" and "tax debt relief", is using them still unique despite their similarities? Should I put them together to be "tax debt help relief"?

I guess my confusion surrounds optimizing for exact KW phrases or exact individual kw's put into a phrase...

Thanks!

[james.smith]

Keywords are the words people will type in to a search engine. If the keywords you have chosen are the same as the ones they have put in, you come up in the search engine's results pages. How high up you are depends on your ability to pick good words and use a few tricks.

use a few tricks. First, the code:

<meta name="keywords" content="tax solutions,tax debt help,tax debt relief">

You just add in your words, separated by commas. You can put in as many as you want, but I would advise against more than 25-30. Many search engines regard pages with hundreds of keywords as spam pages, and delete them from their indexes, and you don't want that. Tax solutions, tax debt help and tax dept relief are perfectly fine. If you want you can add some more keywords but not more than 30.

[T.I.M]

Originally Posted by james.smith

Keywords are the words people will type in to a search engine. If the keywords you have chosen are the same as the ones they have put in, you come up in the search engine's results pages. How high up you are depends on your ability to pick good words and use a few tricks.

use a few tricks. First, the code:

<meta name="keywords" content="tax solutions,tax debt help,tax debt relief">

You just add in your words, separated by commas. You can put in as many as you want, but I would advise against more than 25-30. Many search engines regard pages with hundreds of keywords as spam pages, and delete them from their indexes, and you don't want that. Tax solutions, tax debt help and tax dept relief are perfectly fine. If you want you can add some more keywords but not more than 30.

Where would you suggest we put this code?

[ASpaventa]

That goes in the head section of your HTML, before the body tag.

[bhartzer]

More specifically, with the meta keywords tag, you will want to make sure that the keywords there actually appear on the web page where that meta tag appears. If you do not mention "tax solutions" anywhere on the web page (in the title tag, in the meta description tag, in the body copy of the page) then it should not appear in your meta keywords tag.

[T.I.M]

Originally Posted by ASpaventa

That goes in the head section of your HTML, before the body tag.

Ah, okay, thank you.

[torka]

Sorry to disappoint y'all, but if you're concerned with Google, they don't even index the meta keywords tag. The contents and format of that tag will have approximately zero --no, that is to say, exactly zero -- effect in Google.

That tag was spammed to death years ago and they long since stopped paying attention to it. And yes, this has been tested and proven on multiple occasions by some of the most skilled people in the SEO industry.

If you want to rank well and get traffic for a particular phrase, that phrase needs to be in the title tag (i.e. <title="your key phrase">) in the HEAD section of your page. Depending on how competitive the phrase is, it's at least helpful -- and may be necessary -- to have the phrase appear in the anchor text of links pointing to the page. Again, depending on how competitive the phrase is, you may need to include it one or more times in the body text of the page (including headers, paragraphs and alt attributes of images).

It is not necessary to stuff the body text with the phrase (i.e. repeat the phrase over and over and over and over). There is no standard or optimal "keyword density" you need to write to. Just include the phrase naturally in the page content and you'll be fine.

Each page of your site should be optimized for somewhere around two to three phrases. Don't optimize every page for the same phrase. Not because there's some kind of search engine penalty for this, but because it's a waste of good site real estate. Google's only going to list two pages from your site in the results on one page for that phrase, so there's no point in optimizing all the other pages of the site for the same phrase. Instead, you can optimize them for other phrases for which you can then also potentially get rankings and traffic.

Hope this helps.

--Torka