Optimizing Your Text for Search Engines
Your text: aside from being the most important part of your
site, it's also the most important part of your
search engine placement strategy. How you use your
keywords in the text of your site matters almost as much a the
list itself. Note, all search engines look at keyword density or
prominence differently; what follows is general advice.
Keyword density or keyword weight
Your Meta tag keywords need to be on your page a certain
number of times to rank well. Do not mindlessly dump your
keywords onto your page. This is considered spamming by most
search engines and your site may be penalized in the rankings.
Instead, repeat your keywords in natural patterns. It is
suggested that keywords be sprinkled into your text at a rate of
between 1% and 10%. If your word appears more than 20%, it may be
considered spam, and it will hurt your rankings.
You have chosen great keywords; now use them. If for example,
your Web page was dedicated to the keyword "Web page
design", do not be overly tempted to substitute your term
with a pronoun ("it") or spice things up by using the
word "development". For many writers, you may have to
break the habit of running to a thesaurus. Use your discretion
here: while you want your page to rank well with the search
engines, you don't want wear your human readers out. (Reading a
Web page is hard enough without the monotony of rereading the
same word over and over again.)
It's not
recommended that you create a very short page in order to
produce a greater ratio of keywords to non-keywords. For
example, if you have a page that read: "Web page design is
a very important aspect of Internet sales" against the
following keywords: "web page design, internet sales".
Apparently, search engines are now giving more weight to meatier
pages with substantial information (three or more paragraphs, or
at least 300 words). Be sure you are actually communicating
something to your users.
Keyword Proximity
How closely your keywords appear on the page may also effect
your rankings. As was mentioned before, a long list or a cluster
of keywords is spam. Search engines are sophisticated enough now
to recognize attempts at artificially stuff a page with
keywords.
Keyword Prominence
Keyword prominence referees to WHERE your keywords are
placed. Your page title, headings, link text, first words (top of the
page, beginning of tags, beginning of paragraph) are presumably
more important than the final word of your final paragraph.
Search engines will look more carefully at section titles (headings
and titles) assuming that these words accurately reflect the
content of your page.
Word Order
In theory, search engines score your text higher if your
keywords appear in the same order as listed in your Meta tag.
When writing sentences, begin with the keywords at the beginning
of your list, words that, presumably, are more important and
trail off with words you do not want to emphasize as much.
Conclusions
If your goal is the best possible search engine ranking, be
prepared to work a little harder on your copy. Your first goal,
as always, is to communicate effectively with your human
readers. Only then should you begin to massage your text for the
search engines.
Keyword spiders:
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