Basic SEO: What Search Engines Love - Keywords
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I mentioned keywords briefly in the last section. It goes without saying that these are vital when it comes to SEO. However, there are a few basic concepts you should keep in mind when designing you site. For one, it is a good idea to make a list of keywords relevant to your site's main focus. Be sure to rank them in terms of what is searched for the most. Each page in your site should be optimized for one or two keyword phrases.
The best place to put a keyword is right at the beginning of the TITLE tag (more on this later). As an example, let's say I have a website dedicated to duck fashion. Obviously, my main keyword phrase will be “duck fashion,” but each page will be optimized for a different, yet related, keyword, such as duck hats, duck shirts, duck shoes, duck fashion shows, and so on. You should also try to incorporate other keyword phrases throughout each page, when appropriate. A site with many pages containing the keyword phrase will be ranked higher when it is searched for than one that only mentions it on a single page.
Whatever you keyword phrase is, make sure you give it prominence within a page component (TITLE tag, DESCRIPTION meta tag, body text, etc.). A word at the top of a page is more prominent than one at the bottom. The same goes for a word at the beginning of a tag compared to one at the end. Search engines look for prominence when determining what a particular page is about.
When a user searches for a keyword phrase, the search engine tries to determine the ratio of the search phrase to the total number of words in each page. This is called keyword density. It is important to create a balance because it is possible to overdo it. If the search phrase makes up 40-50% of the words in a page, the search engine will disregard it. But if the density is too low, the search engine might think it's irrelevant.
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