Keywords and Tags
Thursday October 19, 2006
Keywords are words that can be used to find useful results in Internet searches. If you were looking for web pages about cattle ranching, useful keywords would include cattle, cows, ranching, ranch, and bovine just to name a few. These words should narrow the search and return results that have a relationship to what you hope to learn. Keywords are used by the search engines to help index the content found on web pages.
The term keyword has a different meaning for users of America Online. In that context, keyword is a substitute for a url. The keyword "Health" might take AOL users to a web page with health related subjects. This is particular to that system and not how the rest of the Internet views keywords.
Getting blog content indexed by the search engines is similar to getting other web content indexed, with a few exceptions. Blog content goes from useful to useless depending on the perspective of the reader. What happened in 8th period science class does not have as wide of an appeal as the opinions of a published professor at a prestigious law school. It is my belief that the search engines have tweaked their algorithms to weight blog entries differently from other web content in an attempt to separate signal from noise. Keywords have a financial value that must be considered with reqard to selling advertising as well as search results.
Google Blog Search and Technorati are two well known indexes that track blog entries. Technorati relies on a keyword schema that refers to the keyword as a tag. Tagging is the process where a keyword is used to describe a blog post. The tags allow the post to be indexed based upon the keywords attached to the post. Technorati tracks the blogoshpere in real time. Users ping the search engine when fresh content has been added to a site. Here are some additional resources to consider.