You’ve probably heard of SEO, since it’s very hot right now. It stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a site by designing the site content so that the site ranks high in the search results of a search engine.
The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that a user will visit that site. Let’s face it, most people are lazy. They’re not going to spend time clicking and scanning tons of pages of search results. Therefore, where a site ranks in a web search is absolutely critical for directing more traffic toward the site. SEO helps to make sure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine. To understand how this works, you need to know a little bit about how search engines work. Typically, a search engine sends out a spider to fetch as many documents as it can. Then another program, called an indexer, reads these documents and makes an index based on the words each document contains. Each search engine uses a unique proprietary algorithm to create indexes so that hopefully only meaningful results are returned for each query.
These indexers compute the keyword density.
Keyword density refers to the how often a certain word appears in a given document. It’s given as a percentage. Let’s say you have a site about running shoes. A keyword density of 7% on “running” on that web page means that out of 1000 words, 70 of them are “running.”
Unfortunately, the quick-buck con artists have figured this out, and they will put up a site that has a front page that is totally littered with keywords. To give you an idea, a normal key word density for the main key words is about 3 to 7%. What these people will do is have something insane like a 25% keyword density on their front page. Then that page ranks #1 in search engine results when users search for that word. Once the user is on the entry page, they’re likely to enter the site. Pornographers do this by putting up sites that have content like:
Sex, sex, sex. Sex is here. You want sex. We have sex. Pix of sex, lots of sex.
See how annoying that gets?
Search engines used to use meta-tags to search for web sites. This was nice, since the meta-tag was a hidden area of your page where you could put all the relevant keywords and not have to worry about making your content sound awkward by overusing certain words.
Why is keyword density important?
Because, as I said earlier, it measures how often that particular word comes up. Keyword density is also known as keyword weight. The higher the percentage of keywords in relationship to other text, the higher your page will rank—to point. Many search engines, Google included, have gotten wise to the fact that extremely high keyword densities are probably contrived. Here's an example of how keyword density it measured. Let's assume the keyword phrase is "cat food."
Cat food is our only business.
Since "is", "our," and other stop words are usually not counted, there are three "words" in the sentence: "puppy food," (which the search engine counts as one word, since that’s what it’s searching for), "only," and "business." "Cat food" composes 1/3 of the sentence, or 33%.
Realistically, keyword density is almost never this high, nor should it be or your copy will sound very contrived. The recommended density is 3-7%. This means that your keyword should repeat 3-7 times for every 100 words.
Sure, that may not sound hard, but believe me--having 10 keywords and trying to repeat each one 3-7 times per 100 words of text is practically impossible. Instead of trying to do that (and having copy that sounds really weird), pick two or three of your most important keywords and try to use them 3-7 times for every 100 words.
Keyword proximity
Some engines, such as Google, use keyword proximity as part of their ranking formulas. So what’s it mean? Keyword proximity refers to how close keywords are to each other. You want to put your keywords as close together as possible and make sure your sentences are clear.
Here's an example:
Meow Mix sells the very best cat food as far as taste tests of actual cats are concerned.
versus
Meow Mix scored number one in taste tests to see what kind of food is really preferred by the typical cat.
The two keywords are "cat" and "food." If a user searches for "cat food," the first sentence will rank higher because its keywords are closer to each other. Why do search engines do this? Because if you’re searching for “running shoes”, a page that contains “running shoes” is probably relevant, but a page that contains, “I was running late for work and forgot to put on my good shoes,” probably is not.
Things to Consider for SEO
There are many things to consider when you go to put keywords in the text of your pages. Most search engines index the full text of each page, so you should put your keywords throughout your text. However, each search engine uses different ranking algorithms. And that’s the really hard part--difficult though it may be, you need to keep all of them in mind.
General rules
Your main page should be full of keywords because that page has a higher chance of being indexed than other pages. And for some search engines, it will be the only page that is indexed.
Some engines will rank your page highly if it has at least 100 words on it, so consider that your minimum. Directories include pages based on the quality of their content, so make sure your pages aren't just lists of keywords. If you do that, you risk not getting in the big directories AND you will irritate readers—they won’t come back.
Important design concepts
When you create your pages' content, pay attention to:
Keyword prominence
Proximity
Density
Frequency
The thing about keyword prominence is that the best place to place keywords in your text is at the top of each page, preferably the main page. The closer your keywords appear to the start of the page or the start of a sentence, the better. You'll frequently see “keyword prominence” used to describe search engines' algorithms. Be aware that some engines also say the bottom of the page should contain keywords as well.
It gets more complicated. Search engines view pages differently than people do. Try to put keyword-rich text at the very top of your page. If you put images at the top of your page, make sure to include ALT tags so the search engine ignores them.
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