The effective use of keywords remains a vitally important part of the work carried out by a agency. It’s important to make sure your pages aren’t bulging with over-used keywords, or your ALT tags over-stuffed with words that have little or no relevance to the page they’re on.
The Internet is still full of sites put together by people who insist on falling into the same old traps in the use of keywords. One prevalent example is repetition in the keyword tag. For example: “jackets, winter jackets, summer jackets, waterproof jackets and casual jackets” illustrates two of the most common errors. The repeated use of ‘jackets’ would be seen as over-use by most search engines and consequently, the site’s ranking would drop. Also, there’s no need to type “…and casual jackets” ‘and’ is what’s known as a Stop Word – a word in such common use that it’s ignored by the search engines to save server space and speed up searches. A far more effective keyword tag would read “jackets,winter,summer,waterproof,casual” – as long as the page is about jackets to begin with!
It is also easy to make the mistake of overloading the and tags. Good are well versed in creating readable titles that search engines notice. These, along with well-written descriptions are essential. It’s important to bear in mind, also, that most search engines display the description. There’s little point in gaining a good if the description does nothing to tell the reader about your site.