Despite all the talk about keywords and optimization, many people still don't understand exactly what keywords are or how they work.
First of all, many experts currently believe that, with the greater sophistication of today's search engines, keywords are simply words within the content of a page that, used repeatedly, draw the search engines' spiders organically. The old "meta-tag" keyword is believed to be obsolete and many pages, especially those written primarily in PHP or JS, dispense with them entirely.
Historically, keywords were one of the original building blocks of an HTML webpage. Like all the other code that is never seen by the end-user, keywords were one of the "meta-tags" put in the header section of an HTML page. Today, many pages are written in Java Script or PHP and not only don't have keywords, they don't have meta-tags, though they could.
Because, the fact is, both of these newer programming languages are simply outgrowths of HTML. And, since the internet is still html based, the newest language around must still be able to interact with html, just as the browsers must always be able to read it. But, further than that, because HTML is much easier to learn and understand for the average person, its use may continue for sometime to come.
My point is, despite all the advances made and the higher level of sophistication with search engines, good, ol' meta-tag keywords still have an impact. I found out just how much of an impact the other day. Until then I, like most, believed they were pretty much obsolete. Until I stumbled into something interesting.
I was updating my page and, simply because they were there, I decided to check the meta-tag keywords against the "Keyword Selector Tool," which reports search requests from the previous month's traffic. As I did, I found many of my keywords received very low requests. But I noticed that, by simply changing some words from present to past tense or adjusting a phrase the result could have dramatically higher requests, as much as hundreds of thousands of search requests' difference.
I then went a step further, looking for relevant words that had the highest search requests and added those to my meta-tags. Mind you, the only place I changed the keywords was in the meta-tags. I saved the changes, uploaded them and didn't think much more about it.
That was on Tuesday. This morning I checked my site stats and found that Wednesday and Thursday my traffic jumped by 3 times it's normal usage.
Is this ONLY because I changed my meta tags? I made no other significant changes to either my site or my marketing. . . . in fact, that was the only change I'd made this week. Of course, it could be simply a flute-- maybe there just happened to be more people online, or more visiting my site for other, indefineable reasons. I have seen unaccountable spikes in traffic before. Sometimes at surprising times of the day or week.
So I'll monitor this and let you know. If I continue to see a steady increase, especially if I see the kind of "normal" spike on top of this increase, I'll know it's more than just an isolated incident. But, at this point, I have every reason to believe that, going against all common wisdom, meta-tag keywords are still an important part of optimizing a website.--mo
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