Keyword Optimization

This article discusses keyword optimization and its impact on search engine results.

Keywords are one of the ways that you let a search engine know what the subject area or concept is of your website. On a

web page, they help to let the search engine discover the subject of the page. Using the keyword effectively for both your human visitors and the search engines is called keyword optimization. It's also known as creating a search engine friendly web page.

Search engines need to know this so they can return the most useful page results to users when the search on a particular term.

This makes choosing the right key word for your web page and using it appropriately on your web page will bring free targeted organic traffic to your website.

Google wants to return pages to users that are full of great high quality information related to the search terms that were used to find it. They use a complicated algorithm to analyze all of the websites in their database that include the keyword or phrase that someone is searching on.

The search results at the top of the page are not necessarily the sites with the best content, but rather the pages that have been optimized the best. Unfortunately for many website publishers, if your site isn't optimized for the search engines, it could include grate content but it may never appear in the search results.

Using keywords correctly and keyword density are important factors in keyword optimization.

Keyword Optimization - Make Your Pages Search Engine Friendly

A search engine friendly page is one that has been optimized correctly for the search engines. If you follow the techniques described below you'll make your pages search engine friendly.

Getting your web page to the top of Google's search results is doable especially if you're not in a very competitive niche. If you are, it's still doable, but it may take a lot more time.

Put Your Keyword in the Web Page File Name

Include your keyword in the file name of the web page. A very basic way of telling the search engines what your page is about is to include the keyword or phrase in the file name for the page. For example if the subject of your page is Delta Table Saws, then use a file name something like delta-table-saws.html or deltatablesaws.html.

Using descriptive file names that include your keywords will score much higher in the search results than pages named with generic terms such as page1.html or section1.html

Put Your Keyword in the Page Title

Include your keyword in the title of the page. The title is text that appears between the <title>Title Goes Here</title> tags in the header section of our web page. So to carry on with the Delta Table Saw page, the title should include your key word and be something like <title>Delta Table Saws</title>.

I've also found it helpful to include the name of my site in the title too. This helps visitors to visually scan the search results and quickly determine if they've been to your site before and may drive them to click on your link again is the first time they visited, they found your sites useful. I've had success using something like <title>Delta Table Saws at Old Woodworking Tools.net</title> or <title>Delta Table Saws | Old Woodworking Tools</title>.

Some SEO gurus believe that the keyword included in the title of the page has a larger impact on search engine results than keywords in the meta tags. I believe it's not any one strategy, but rather a combination of things you must do with your keywords to get to the top of Google.

Put Your Keyword in the Meta Tags

Include your keyword or phrase in the keyword meta tag. Meta tags appear in the header of the web page. They do not show up in the viewable text of your page so visitors to your website never see them, but the search engines will.

The two most important meta tags are the ones for Keywords and the Description of the web page. The information contained in a pages meta tags is one more piece that search engines like Google use to determine the content of your web page and that contribute to the overall keyword optimization of your web page.

Add only one or two keywords to your meta tags for keywords and description. Don't use them more than one time in the meta tag. Some sites will place 10 or 20 keywords in the meta tags but this only confuses the search engines and makes if more difficult for their algorithms determine the true subject of your web page. If you add too many keywords to the meta tags the search engines may conclude that you are spamming them and may drop your page from the index.

If the search engines can't tell what your page is about, it won't be included in the search results. That's what making a search engine friendly page is all about... easily communicating to the search engines about the content of your web page.

The keywords you use should be related to the content of the page and ones with high demand and low supply so that you have a good chance of ranking high with the search engines. Of course there's much more to it than that including off-site marketing and promotion, but getting the on-page keyword optimization correct is the first step.

I've found it useful to include just one or two at the most keywords and/or phrases on a single web page. If you have to include more than two keywords, then consider breaking up your content into two separate pages that more specifically focus on the content related to the keyword. This will result in a better more tightly focused web page and one that if optimized correctly will score well with the search engines.

All of the pages on your website together with their corresponding keywords will define the content of the entire website for the search engines.

Put Keywords in the Body Text of Your Web Page

Where it will sound correct and make for easy reading for your visitors, blend in your keyword occasionally throughout the text of your web page. Be sure to include it in each of the first couple of paragraphs at the beginning of the page and near the end of the page.

Don't use the keyword so often that you might be accused of spamming the search engines, but do use it where it reads well and is necessary to communicate the content of the page.

There is no magic number for keyword density or for how many time to include your keyword on your page.

Using the Keyword an average of once per paragraph is a good strategy or have an overall keyword to total word count ratio of about 3 to 6 percent. So if you have 100 total words on your page, blend in between three and six instances of the keyword in the text on your page.

Some SEO experts will also say to highlight at least one of the keywords on the page in bold. Others say that using a keyword on your page as a link to another page on your site is also important for keyword optimization.

Put Keywords in the Headings on Your Web Page

Finally using your keyword in the headings especially the first one or the <h1>Heading</ h1> on your page is important. Organizing the content of your page and using the heading tags will create an outline for the search engines and your human visitors to follow.

Put Keywords in Image File Names and Alt Tags

Finally another strategy for getting to the top of the search engines is to use your keyword in the file names of any images you include on your page and in the "alt" tags for those images. The search engines will read the meta tags on these pages and process that information when determining the overall content of your web page.

Summarizing Keyword Optimization

To summarize some of the important steps for making your web page search engine friendly and keyword optimized, do the following:

• Use the keyword in the page file name
• Put the keyword in the page title
• Put the keyword in the Meta Tags for Keywords and Description
• Use the keyword 3% to 6% of the time in the body text
• Use the keyword in the headings on your web page.
• Make at least one instance of your keyword bold
• Use our keyword as a link to other related pages.
• Put the keyword in Image File Names and Alt Tags

 

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