Forum Moderators: open
Many thanks for your time.
Search engines like Google don't index web sites. They index each webpage separately so each of your pages should be viewed as an opportunity to get found for different KWs.
Every page is dealt individually by SE.
Metakeywords and metadescription are needed but they are not the most important nowadays. I currently have ONE metadescription for the all website and different metakeywords per main section.
But you should make sure that you have a different title on every page with different texts in h elements (h1 to h5) taking keywords from your title.
A couple more questions.
1. Is there a recommended maximum number of keyword phrases for each page?
2. When I design pages I have not been using heading tags I've just been specifying what I want the text to look like e.g. <font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="2"> From what you've said Tomda and from what I've read since I presume I would be far better off using the Heading tags?
Re Keyword density have a look at this recent thread [webmasterworld.com...] There are many more in the archives if you care to dig them out.
2) I use one H1, one H2 and one H3 per page. I have never used anything past an H3.
3) I also never use more than one H1 tag per page and I don't use too many keywords/keyword phrases that my pages sound or look spammy.
I really do appreciate your comments.
But if you have a bit of knowledge of style sheet (CSS), it would be much easier and faster to use a single style sheet.
BeeDeeDubbleU said earlier that search engines index pages separately rather than the web site as a whole. I have misunderstood the whole search engine thing as I thought that search engines only searched homepages and therefore it was pointless having a homepage which had a couple of graphics on and hardly any text because there wouldn't be much for the search engine to find. But since search engines do search each page seperately then it would be ok to have a nice little fancy home page. Is that right?
1. "keywords" - meaning the words or phrases "targeted" by a page, i.e., the words or phrases you design the page to ranks for
2. "keywords" - the content of the keywords META tag
When Ogletree suggests targeting one keyword per page, he means that he thinks it is best to optimize the page for a single keyword or phrase, i.e. "blue widgets". The keywords meta tag on that page, though, might contain related words, alternate spellings, etc.
If you are asking about the keywords meta tag, I wouldn't spend much time thinking about it. The major SEs don't use it. I still usually fill it in, as some smaller SEs and private search bots may still accord it some weight, but it's no big deal.
It would certainly make it easier to write the text if I only had to support 1 or 2 kw.
Point taken about the title.
And thanks for comments about the 2 types of keywords. That's really helpful.
But since search engines do search each page seperately then it would be ok to have a nice little fancy home page.
You can, meaning that you don't have to think in terms of all your traffic coming into that main page, and so having to fill it with every kw, in the text, that you can think of. Other pages can be focussed on lots of other kw's, with many variations in the <title></title>. That's the best way to go... lots of text-heavy, pertinent pages, focussed on lots of kw's, with appropriate linking steering the PR to the pages that you really want to do well.
BUT, many of your incoming links will be to the index/default page, www.example.org, so you want to have it optimized for your most important kw's, (which might only be 3 or 4 different words), and include variations, "widget" "widgeting", in regular html text, in a way that reads naturally and fits in with what you're trying to do. A couple of usages of every one of the main kw variations will usually do it. If it's written naturally, then you'll have the variations appearing in various orders, so "widgets by widget-king", "widget-kings widgets", will all be covered, (SE's pay attention to word order for the serps).
For sure, don't spam the index page with the same words repeated a whole heap of times... it looks trashy to your visitors, let alone SE's.
KW metatags don't make much difference with any of the SE's. Stick a few of them in, and forget about it.
I always think that any discussion about handling more than a handful of keywords in a site should give a nod to one of Brett's classic articles, Search Engine Theme Pyramids [searchengineworld.com].
It's very intuitive and very basic, and that sounds like just what you need right now. It goes from the general through to the specific "money" phrases. It's very flexible, you can scale it down, you can scale it up; it's the idea that counts.
Keep in mind that when you read about keyword phrases in that article, these are the ones that are going to be (should be) woven through your page title, meta description, meta keywords, h1, and your body text.
Write naturally, don't force anything, be fluid.
The meta keywords isn't really as necessary as it was, well, it seems like eons ago. Yahoo is the only major that is known to use it to some extent, as rogerd pointed out, for mispellings, etc. But I think including them is a good discipline; I know it helps me focus on what I think the page is about.
In answering above please differentiate between desirable and essential! as it may mean I need to change a lot of pages!
