Back in the day before the web exploded to what we know it as now, the whole arena was a little mysterious.

HTML developers were getting paid a ton of money to build websites for every business out there and they were looking for ways to get to the top of search engine results, much like they still are today.

Things have changed, web development doesn’t pay as well as a career anymore and the web is even more complicated.

But, everyone still wants to be on the top of a search engine result page.

Within HTML code there is a section with the “head” tags that deals with META data. That is data that the human reader does not see, or care about.

It may contain information about the character set being used, a description of the website etc..

There’s still one tag widely used.. “Keywords”. Even before Google, web search engines used crawlers and spiders and whatever else you want to call the software they use to interrogate every web-page they could find. Their intentions were very good, to build up a list of as many pages as they could to give their customers accurate results.

They relied a lot on the keywords of a site to do this, because if you are selling a product online you are surely only going to use the keywords that are relevant to your site? Of course not, people found out instantly that they could beat the system by using too many keywords or keywords that were not relevant. – An honor system the web is not.

To this end, keywords are largely ignored now as search engines have a lot more information available to them.

But don’t forget the description tag! This is as important as the title of your page.

Keywords out, description in.

Write for people, optimize for search engines.