Effective Keyword Use as an SEO Ranking Factor - Keywords in Meta Description Tag
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Having keywords in your meta description tag is very important for your click through rate, which is definitely a part of the Google algorithm. The meta description appears in search results under the blue link. It is a short summary of the page. Playing with this tag showed an increase in click through rate, which is good for the SERPs and the bottom line. Put something interesting and provocative in there, or make people smile.
<meta name="description" content="this text will show in search results under the blue link" />
If you have no meta description tag, Google will pull a snippet of the page which contains the searched-for keyword. Google may also use your DMOZ description in place of the meta description tag. Yahoo may use the Yahoo Directory description in place of the meta description tag. You can block both of them:
<meta name="ROBOT NAME" content="nodp" /> This will stop Google, Yahoo and Live from pulling a description from DMOZ.
<meta name="SLURP" content=" noydir" /> This will stop Yahoo from pulling a description from the Yahoo Directory (if you're listed there).
You can also stop Google from making snippets of your page featured in search results:
<meta name="googlebot" content=" nosnippet" />
I would not recommend this, because it may affect your click through rate for some long tail searches. Bolded keywords proved to funnel more visitors from search results, and you never know what long tail combination people will come up with when they search.
Keywords in Content
This is an important factor, but look at it from the perspective of having a natural occurrence of your keywords rather than "stuffing" your content with them. With the purchase of Applied Semantics, Google became smarter in natural language processing. It also scanned millions of books, which may help the search engine see word relationships.
Rich content is perfect for many long tail referrals, which can account for a lot of traffic (if yours is a low trust site). Instead of focusing on bogus keyword density measures, ignore keyword density tools and write natural articles.
It's possible to rank a site with little content, but link investment will be a lot larger.
ALT tags and Image Tags
Keywords in alt tags of image links serve as the anchor text of a link.
Keywords in alt tags and title tags of non-linked images help with rankings of image search results. Search engines have no other way of knowing if the image they're serving in actuality is the image that user requested, other than to analyze links, the content surrounding the image, filename, alt and title attributes.
<img src="site.com/directory/images/example.jpg" title="this is where image title goes" alt="this is where image ALT description goes" width="400" height="300" />
Here's more on alt and image tags at Google groups.
Next: The Most Important SEO Factors >>
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