Found in Translation
If the proper subject of my page is "identifying the subject of a web page for search engine optimization" I still have one more step before implementation. I call this step "subject translation." It's really pretty simple. All you have to do is ask yourself the question, what might I type in to Google if I were interested in learning about how to identify the subject of a web page?
And in asking this question I've come close to answering it. I'd probably type in something like "how to identify the subject of a web page." This translation step is important because people don't usually use the best possible words and phrases
in their search requests. They play around with different ways of wording their queries until they get what they want. As the translator, you simply want to take the subject and translate it slightly, to match the words and phrases people might actually use to find it.
So in this case I'll translate my subject from "identifying the subject of a web page for search engine optimization" to "how to determine the best keywords for a web page." I've added the phrase "how to" because people sometimes form their search phrases with questions. I've changed the word "subject" to "best keywords" because while determining the subject is what really is at issue, people don't think of it that way. They think about "keywords"--so they'd likely use that word in their search.
Finally, I'm going to check a couple things out before I nail down my phrase. I need to know if people usually spell "keywords" as one word or two, and the same question for web page. For this I'll use Google Trends.
Google Trends
Google Trends (trends.google.com) is a great tool for determining which words or topics people are typing into search Google most frequently. In this case I just enter the two options separated by a comma. Keywords, and Key Words. Clearly Keywords as one word is more popular so I'll use that, and web page is usually entered as two words so I'll stick with that.
Eric,
Thank you for the article - it's a great introduction into optimizing a site for search engines, and your approach is terrific.
I do think it's important to note the importance of the description meta tag, however. You write, "You can also place your target words and phrases in the keywords and description fields....As a result search engines pretty much ignore these fields."
While this is true in terms of the rank of a webpage, the description field is not ignored when it comes to the display of a webpage. Often, search engines (including Google) display the description meta tag as the "blurb" of text that appears below the site name in the results pages. This blurb influences the decision of the user to click through to the site, so taking the time to write a good description meta tag is really important to click-thrus, if not to rankings.
On the other hand, I totally agree with you about the keywords meta tag. We're even exploring removing that altogether, in an effort to simplify clients' on-site SEO maintenance.
Hi Susan. Thanks for the comment. You're right of course. Description are sometimes used in the search results. I tend to prefer the "snippets" that Google generates with the relevant parts of the page text in bold, so I don't usually give my descriptions much thought. Maybe I should.
Hi Eric,
Thanks for the article, I learned a lot of stuff in the video especially on which steps to take first. Though search engines changes their algorithms especially google from time to time, at least I get to know more about the basics. Hope to see more updated videos from your blog.
Very well written. Very unique, impressive, and helpful information. Thank you for sparing your time to write all this in detail