Search Keywords
Metadata is the term used to describe additional information
about a web page, such as the author of the page and a summary of
the page contents. This information is grouped into sections called
metatags which are hidden from view in the code of the web
page.
The 'keywords' meta tag stores a list of keywords which relate
to the content of the page and are historically used by search
engines to match the most relevant page to the words that a person
types into a search engine.
Most search engines no longer use meta data when crawling
websites to compile their indexes (including Google, Yahoo, Lycos
and Altavista) and now ignore the content of the keywords metatag
due to misuse of the tag by some websites. We have found that
keywords can greatly improve the accuracy of searches carried out
by users of our website.
One of the main reasons for the greater accuracy is that some of
the search engines do not correctly interpret the information that
is present in the text of the page. For example someone searching
for pothole will get different results to someone searching for
potholes, due to the way search engines interpret plurals, and so
we have decided to include relevant keywords on our web pages to
cover a range of possible search words a user may enter.
This helps to ensure that users of our site are taken to the
correct page when they search, making it easier for them to access
the content and services we provide and making our website more
user-friendly.