With the blog now live for several days, I guessed that it was time to look for traffic. I decided, therefore, to have a crack at meta tags. Meta tags are snippets of information inserted in a page header that say what the page is about to search engines. The “Description” tag, for example, is used to describe the page or site. This is the description you see on search engine results pages. Words used in the “keywords” tag can help improve your search engine placement, though the usefulness of this is questioned by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch in somewhat punchy terms (I read Danny’s article in particular as Search Engine Watch are ranked first on Google for the search term meta tags, so they definitely know what they’re talking about). Anyway, as Tesco are keen to point out, every little helps. So without further ado, I looked to Wordtracker for keyword assistance. Wordtracker is a very good (in my opinion) keyword research tool that tells users which keywords should be used to drive more traffic to a website. As they say on their site:Enter a term that describes your business or service.
We’ll find you as many related keywords as possible.You’ll find out whether people actually search for these keywords.E-mail, print or refine your selection.Find out how many other people are competing for your keywords in Altavista. Easy enough. I downloaded the Wordtracker trial to give it a whirl. As this blog is about traffic, I entered the term traffic. Amusingly, the top keyword returned was traffic cameras, much adored by British motorists, followed by traffic information. Web traffic emerged in sixth place. Other relevant keywords were web site traffic, increase website traffic, increased web site traffic, more web site traffic and even more website traffic (ok, I made this one up). I added these keywords to my basket. Wordtracker then compared these on MSN (you can try the other engines once you pay up) and informed me that they were poor ones to target, as there are too many competing web pages with the these same keywords. Despite the warning, I will use these keywords anyway, but will nevertheless keep an eye on search terms people are using. Technorati Profile