Adding keywords

One of the most important uses of the <meta> tag is to add keywords. Some search engines index your site automatically and use your keywords as an index. If someone uses the search engine to search for a word that is one of your keywords, your site appears in the results list. Easy isn’t it? But only about 21% of web pages use keywords.

The clever little search engines even rank the results of a search with the most relevant results first. The search engines follow some basic rules to do this, they think:

• Pages with keywords in the title are more relevant than other pages
• Pages with keywords near the top of the page are also more relevant. Obviously, any page relevant to the search topic mentions that topic in the heading or first few paragraphs
• The more often the keyword appears in relation to other words; the more relevant the page

All the search engines are, however, slightly different. Some index more web pages than others and some also index the pages more often. No search engine has the same collection of pages.

Some search engines (e.g. WebCrawler) decide to promote pages on the grounds that lots of other pages point to them or because the company that produces the search engine has reviewed the site.

If you enter keywords in the <meta> tag, this may give the page a boost. HotBot and Infoseek do this but Excite doesn't. Don’t think you can fool the search engines by entering a word lots of times or making text invisible or tiny (spamming I believe this is called), they will sulk and refuse to index your page. Besides, it is not cricket is it? And only a really sad anorak would do such a thing.

So, pick keywords carefully and put them in the important locations such as the title and the first paragraph of the text.

For example:

<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, CSS, DHTML, XHTML">

Separate keywords with a comma.