Help Google to Understand your Site using Keywords
Most websites get a lot of their traffic from search engines. I lifted the chart below from YLF’s Google webmaster statistics and it shows that 41% of our traffic comes from search engines, 32% comes from direct traffic (people typing in the URL or clicking on a link in an email message) and 27% comes from referring sites (people clicking on a link to YLF from another website).
The giant among search engines is Google. Nobody outside of Google knows exactly how their algorithm works, but if you search around the web you will find some guidelines on what to do and what not to do. The whole topic of making your site search engine-friendly is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.
There are two broad categories of SEO techniques:
- Black Hat SEO: these are techniques that try to trick the search engines into sending people to your site. Don’t use these techniques. Getting caught might result in Google excluding you from their index, which will be disastrous for your traffic.
- Legitimate SEO: these techniques just try to make it easier for the search engines to understand your site and its importance. Adding more relevant content to your website, making it easy for Google to figure out what your site is about and marketing your website to create awareness and incoming links are all legitimate ways to increase your ranking.
Keywords are one way to tell Google what your site is all about. You provide these keywords by putting some HTML before the <body> tag on your webpage. In most WordPress themes you would do this in the “header.php” file. For example, in the YLF theme I have the following code before the <body> tag:
<META name="keywords" content="fashion, body type, what to wear, style, casual wear, dress codes, wedding wear, career wear, footwear, fuller figure, instant style tips, party wear, swimwear, underwear" />
Now, there is a temptation to provide a large number of keywords so that Google associates your website with many different topics, but the wisdom from around the web is that too many keywords will reduce your ranking. Based on this I cut down the YLF keywords a short while ago. It used to be:
<META name="keywords" content="advice, fashion, body type, what to wear, pear shaped, dressing well, trends, style, fashion you can wear, shopping, dress sense, fashion persona, casual wear, event wear, dress codes, dresses, wedding outfits, look slimmer, accessories, power dressing, feel good fashion, look good in your clothes, career wear, celebrities, clothing care, color, european style, fabrications, footwear, fuller figure, global shopping, individual style, fashion industry insider, instant style tips, maternity wear, men's style, party wear, swimwear, underwear" />
Our organic search traffic from Google is still down, so I think I’m going to switch back to the longer list of keywords for a while to see if that helps. You should experiment with different sets of keywords to see what works for you. Note that it can take Google quite a long time to review your site, so any one experiment with keywords should probably be run for at least a month.
Posted: August 2nd, 2008 under Marketing.
Tags: Beginner, Google, SEO