Clear the Cobwebs on your Meta Data

It's now accepted wisdom that Google ignores meta keywords when spidering your site for natural search...

...but is the same true when the AdWords spider comes to scan your landing pages?

Over the past three months, we've been looking at new ways of improving the performance of our clients' AdWords campaigns. One of these was to measure the effect of landing pages on their Quality Score, and the average Cost-Per-Click (CPC) paid for each visit.

When designing websites and landing pages, we always follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines, and are careful to avoid copy that may appear to be spamming keywords or phrases.

Our results show that the "keywords" meta tag has a measurable impact on the average cost-per-click in AdWords, reducing it by as much as 15% over a 30-day period. We've run these tests across a range of different campaigns and keywords with similar results.

We're therefore adding a new set of guidelines to our AdWords Training Courses. Following these simple steps will both reduce your cost-per-click, and improve your position in natural search results:

Step	Description
1	Research and rank your target keywords using Google's Keyword Tool and Wordtracker (for natural search results).
2	Create, review and finalise your page copy, making intelligent use of your target keywords. Write for people, not spiders.
3	Create your meta keywords using only words or phrases that appear in your copy. Your list should contain no more than 15 keywords (or 300 characters), be comma separated without spaces and in rank order. Include no more than 3 instances of a single keyword (to avoid spamming).
4	Create a page title with your target keywords. Page titles should be no more than 60 characters (including spaces).
5	Create your meta description including your target keywords in rank order. Your description should be no more than 180 characters (including spaces).