Keywords & Description
Instructions on Managing Keywords and Description

Editing your website Keywords & Description

Your keywords & description are two of the hidden 'meta tags' hidden in your website programming that tells a search engine what your website is about and how the search engine should categorize and rank your website. When someone goes to a search engine such as Google, and types 'health industry' the search engine is going to return websites with matches in both the 'keywords' and 'description' tags to those 'keywords' that were just used to search for 'health industry' related websites. Therefore, it is important to make sure you use keywords and a description that correctly identifies what your website is about.

Your keywords and phrases should consist of the words or phrases that someone would use to find you through a search engine such as Google. If you want people within a certain geographical area to find you, then the city, state, county, etc of the area you would like should be a part of your keywords and description as well. For instance, a clothing retailer in Portland, Oregon, would probably include something similar to the following:

clothing, retail clothing, clothes, portland clothes, portland, oregon, etc

Test your keywords by going to a search engine such as Google, and try finding companies in your industry and desired geographical location by using your keywords. Give the search engines about four to six weeks to begin registering your new keywords, and then test to see if your site is coming up under searches using variations of your keywords. Keep in mind that search engines are usually looking for matches between your site's keywords and the frequency with which these keywords are found in the actual content of your site (what can actually be seen and read when someone goes to your web pages.)

For additional information on search engines, ranking and keywords, refer to our Newsletter Archive.

How to format keywords

In order for keywords to be read correctly by search engines, one must use a specific format for their keywords. Your Keyword list can be as long as you like, but many search engines will only read the first 25 keywords or phrases. Therefore it is important that the keywords that you feel are most likely to be used are near the top of your keyword list. Keywords must be words or phrases separated by commas as in the following example:

keyword, keyword phrase, keyword2, keyword3, second keyphrase, more keywords and phrases...
(Try to only use numbers and letters, with no punctuation or other special characters.)

How to format the description

The description should simply be a few sentences describing your site and what it contains. It should be in readable format as many search engines will show this description under your listing in searches. Try to describe your site as concisely as possible trying to use your most important keywords.