Yahoo announced at the SMX East conference yesterday that they were no longer using meta keywords. In the report Yahoo stated that they had announced this earlier in the year - but apparently no one outside Yahoo got the memo. While none of the major engines now support meta keywords, I still recommend using them in all your pages. There are a lot of spiders crawling the web that still use this information to categorize your content and can result in back-links to your site.

SEM key phrases, keywords, Yahoo

The key to increasing site relevancy is to have relevant content. In a recent exercise for a client, I was looking for industry terms and phrases to use for a marketing campaign. I used Google’s keyword tool that examines your site for relevant phrases and produces a list of grouped terms from which you might build a AdWords campaign. The problem was the terms that were produced didn’t match the business. This is alarming as this disconnect has serious negative ramifications for the companies organic raking. The site was turning up in organic searches for the same disconnected terms. People at arriving at the site for the wrong phrases didn’t stay, driving up bounce rate, and decreasing the sites relevancy in the search engines (yikes!).

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SEO key phrases, keywords, marketing campaigns

As I mention on the SEO page, key word data is very important for architecting the navigational structure of your website, writing copy, and building your SEM campaigns. There are several good sources for phrases, I look a web logs, Google Analytics data, and the words most often used on other high ranking web sites in the industry. 

If you are looking to expand the words in your SEM campaigns you should examine the ”long tail” of your logs. What you will find is that some of the more specific phrases that occur less often (and are therefore in the tail of the data) actually turn out to be good conversion phrases, and because they are very specific can be inexpensive to bid on.

SEO designing a website, keywords