Meta Keyword Advice
From Adviceopedia
If you are looking for strong search engine placement, you need to find meta keyword advice.
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Meta Keyword Advice
Meta keywords are vital to making sure that your website appears in the appropriate results for search engine queries and that organizational data is thoroughly documented. One of the tools that is used is called metadata, which is included in many engines.
Metadata
Metadata is any kind of data about a certain piece of information such as a book, web page, database, and so on. An example is photo files from a digital camera typically include information about the camera make, photo resolution, and date the photograph was taken. Finding the right keywords for your metadata helps users or customers find your information much more quickly and easily and is vital for successful Internet marketing.
Taxonomies
Taxonomies are standardized lists of key words for organizations, industries, professions, or groups, either formal or informal. They help users to search for information because all information related to a certain topic is listed under the specific designated term. For example, an organization that provides youth services might select the term “child care” for its taxonomy, so users only need to look for items with the meta keyword “child care,” instead of “afterschool care,” “after school programs,” “childcare,” “latchkey programs,” and so on. This is the same principle behind indexing a book or a periodical.
While most organizational or industry taxonomies are created and maintained by specialists such as librarians or knowledge management professionals, the web has given rise to user created taxonomies that are sometimes called folksonomies. In a folksonomy, users are aware of how other users are creating meta keywords or data tags, and so “winners” evolve over time as users try to use the most common ones. Del.icio.us is the most common of folksonomies, and Flickr is another. While Flickr users just index the photographs that they upload to its website, del.icio.us users are, theoretically, indexing the entire web.
If you're adding metadata to an organization's data for knowledge management purposes or to your website to enhance its performance in search engine results here are some tips:
- Look for any related taxonomies
- If you can't find a specialized one, visit del.icio.us to get an idea of what terms searchers are likely to enter
XML
XML, or extensible markup language, is one of the most popular ways of adding metadata to any electronic information. XML is a platform and system for creating metadata and keywords; the users decide what tags they want to use.
Thinking Like Users
While taxonomies and folksonomies are a great start, the best meta keyword advice is “Think like your user.” What words would they use to search for your information or products? Some possibilities for making sure you cover all the bases:
- Leaf through magazine articles about the topic and collect all the words that are relevant.
- Check existing websites and see what metadata they use. See the instructions below.
- Find books on the topic and check the indexes to see what terms the indexers chose.
- Check any existing taxonomies or standardized vocabularies. These are most common in industry and the sciences, but they also exist for other topics.
- Look at subject directories on the web, like Yahoo or The Librarians' Index to the Internet
- Check your thesauruses, especially specialty ones for your area.
Seeing Other Sites' Metadata
For most websites, all you need to do is click on “View,” and then “Page Source” (in Firefox) or “View” and then “Source (in Internet Explorer).
The HTML will likely have a line of code that looks something like this:
<meta name="description" content="a keyword a keyword a keyword"/>
and another that looks like
<meta name="keywords" content="a keyword a keyword a keyword"/>
(Use the actual keywords substituted for “a keyword”)
More Meta Keyword Advice Resources
Your local public or college librarian may have additional advice for you, including recommendations of thesauruses and other collections of keywords or individual advice, since many have a good deal of indexing experience.
