Ask professionals for business advice

Choosing Keyword Phrases and Meta Descriptions

What is a Keyword phrase?

 A keyword phrase is simply a string of multiple keywords which relate to your website. These phrases are those which is entered by an individual into the search form or search "window" of an Internet search to find information related to them.

Choosing the right Keywords or Key Phrases

 In order to improve your rankings on the search engines, you must first identify exactly what your website is offering.  Once you have a good idea of what that is, you need to cut down your idea down to literally just a few words.

This can be achieved in four steps: 

  1. Identifying the topic of your site.
  2. Identifying your target audience
  3. Identifying what search terms they are likely use
  4. Identifying the location of your audience

 Here's an example:

  1. Topic = Carp Fishing
  2. Target Audience = Fishermen
  3. Searching for = Carp Fishing Tackle
  4. Location = UK

 Think of the amount of people who would search for the phrase ‘fishing' compared to the amount of people who search for the phrase ‘carp fishing tackle.'  Now think of how many fishing websites there are in the UK compared to the amount of websites who specialise in ‘carp fishing'

Try to be as specific as possible when deciding upon your keywords.  Try to narrow them down as much as possible.  This will give your website better results in the page rankings.

Here are two examples of good and bad key phrases.

Bad key phrase = Fishing Tackle

Good key phrase = Carp Fishing Tackle UK

What is a Meta Description?

The meta description tag describes your site's content, giving search engines' spiders an accurate summary filled with multiple keywords 

Writing Good Meta Descriptions

The Meta description is seen as the link description in most search engine results pages. For this reason, it is vital for convincing viewers to click on the link. 

  • Make the description a keyword rich summary of the page.
  • Use keywords in a logical sentence structure, rather than a list
  • Keep it as short as possible.  Search engines have maximum character allotments for descriptions.
  • If your description is quite long, make sure the keywords appear at the beginning