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Keywords Tell Search Engines & People What Your Website Is About

Keywords and good web design will help people or search engines find the information, products or services they are looking for. Keywords is the term used for the words or phrase used when entering a search on a search engine.

Keyword Trends - Popularity and Regional Variations

Google Trends provide a service where you can check the usage and popularity of search terms or keywords used, this includes the ability to compare keyword popularity and any regional variations by selecting country in the top right, the default selection is All countries.

Keywords in Links

Website links on a webpage look like this W3 Org page about links which is a user friendly way to present the link rather than using the destination URL linked to. This has 2 benefits in that it allows the web designer to use appropriate anchor text within the the link html code allowing people to see and understand what type of information is likely to be found at the destination of the link.

  1. Link = W3 Org page about links
  2. Link code = <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html">W3 Org page about links</a>
  3. Link destination = http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html
  4. Link anchor text = W3 Org page about links

Keywords in Web Design, Content and SEO

  1. Website pages should provide good information about the product / service or subject using a selection of relevant keywords within the website / page content.
  2. Sometimes it can help people or search engines find your information if your domain name includes the product / subject / keywords
  3. Keyword use within page names may help people find what they are looking for when using search engines.
  4. Keyword use for image file names on your webpage.

Keywords and Meta Tags

Meta tags are parts of the html code that may be used by Search engines to help identify the content of the webpage. You can add important keywords to the meta tags about the products or services on the webpage.

<title>This keyword1 page is about keyword2 and keyword3</title>

<meta name="description" content="A short sentence that describes the content keyword1 of the web page and includes keyword2 and keyword3" />

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3" />

You can also add 'alternate text' to the image within the html code, this is designed to help users that may have impaired vision and use computer software called 'screen readers' which is an audio tool that provides audio description of what is on the screen.

alt text html tag: alt="This text describes the content / picture for the image and will be read by screen reader and search engines so its good to include keywords relevant to the image"