[thelist] SEO tips

john at johnallsopp.co.uk john at johnallsopp.co.uk
Thu Mar 18 01:44:06 CST 2004


> to me it sounds like an appropriate way to create appropriate meta
> content... if you're writing your content to forcibly include
> keywords that you believe will help your rankings, then you aren't
> writing content for your users... or necessarily writing content
> appropriate to your organization, either...
>
> and if you drive your content from your keywords, and if keywords
> themselves aren't really used by SEs, then you're forcing content for
> no good reason except a flawed marketing plan...
>
> i would prefer my meta keywords to actually *reflect* my content
> instead of trying to force my content into the keywords...
>
> cart, horse...

Well, I'm unproven in this area so I'm only passing on what I've read, not
what I've proven to work, but from that I think a) meta keywords don't
matter, b) if you do just write what you like and hope for the best you're
not going to rise above pages that have been crafted to get a good
position, and c) I absolutely agree that no-one wants to read a page
that's not human-optimised, in other words, readable, useful and so on,
and keyword optimisation should be pretty much undetectable to the human
reader.

On the subject of the meta-keywords reflecting content, it still doesn't
really work. What matters also is the scarcity of each keyword in common
language. Under the system proposed, you'll have a stop list that removes
the 'if's and 'but's, but, looking at the last sentence, you'll have
keywords 'matters, scarcity, keyword, common, language'. Is that
meaningful or useful.

On top of that, you shouldn't just be considering keywords, but
keyphrases. So 'meta-keywords reflecting content' might be something that
a searcher might enter, and you'd be top if you included that phrase a few
times.

How many times do people search for 'meta-keywords reflecting content'?
That's the key point. I've just done a site which basically sells kitchen
cabinets. Do I optimise for 'kitchen cabinets', 'kitchen carcases', or
'kitchen cupboards'? That depends partly on my geographic market, but also
on the popularity of each phrase versus the number of sites serving the
phrase .. in other words, it depends what my chances of gaining supremacy
are in each of those markets.

Cheers
J


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