Determining Keywords and Meta Descriptions....

[FSGDAG]

Would anyone like to comment or share how they determine the keywords and meta description they use and select? I'm particularly interested in determining the keywords and meta descriptions used in categories. Obviously you can grab the keywords and meta description of links from their respective websites, but you dont have that option / luxury with categories.

Any and all comments are appreciated!

[Bruceper]

Personally I just choose related words or phrases from knowledge. Lets pick the category "cars". We can easily add in words like motor, transmission, repair, gasoline, gas, fuel, diesel, standard, automatic, five speed, four speed, six speed, three speed, differential, injection (I use the word injection because I already used fuel earlier, using fuel injection would mean I'm doubling up on keywords and search engines don't like that) dodge, chevrolet, gmc, honda, toyota, mitsubishi and the list goes on and on and on.

For more specific categories I think of words that are associated. So if it were a computer site and the category was "video card" I would use words like memory, graphics, graphix, intel, matrox, driver, software, onboard (for onboard video) and so on.

Keywords are a pain and they can take hours to do. Many of my sites don't have them simply because I haven't taken the time to do it.

[FSGDAG]

Bruce...

Thanks for the reply... Do you know of a good peice of software that you might be able to put a word in and it will spit out keywords that should be used?

[CEC]

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal can help.

[Mickey]

It's more difficult to find keywords in French or in other "not English" language.

Lot of people on the web sell lists of english keywords.

You can find the best keywords and expressions here :
Overture- Keyword Assistant

But be careful : it's better to use keywords existing in the texte of your web page. Google bots are clever : they don't like cheaters.
But the trick is to use good keywords in the description of the sites of your directory. So, you'll be sure these keywords are in your web page, and you'll be able to use them in the META tags.

Look at the SEO sites. One can read that for example :
"keep the length of the tag below 200 characters for the keywords and 150 characters for the description".

[inspireme]

i have 2 category structures on the boards for a general directory that have meta keywords. I have written a program that collects them, and pay someone to fill in the gaps and disambiguate.

If you tell me the number of categories i could do this for you - i would tell you how i do it, but it takes a lot of tweaking for each individual case so its not really viable to give instructions.