Links vs. Content: A Needless Debate - If Content is King...
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To begin with, you need lots of keyword rich content.
If you aren't sure what a keyword is, it's simply a word or phrase someone would enter into Google's (or any other search engine) search box. For example, if you are in the travel industry, your main keywords would revolve around travel, destinations, airlines, cruises, and so forth.
To go back a step, high rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs) are the end product of what is known as an algorithm. It's simply a mathematical formula that varies from search engine to search engine. The algorithm focuses heavily on your incoming links, your website title and description, your scripting and coding, and your on page written content. While there are many more factors than that (Google says well over 100), an important consideration is the keywords in your written content.
Search engines love content. Period.
The more content in your website, the better the search engine spiders will like it when they come to crawl your site. To make your content even tastier for the spiders, you need to use your targeted keywords fairly liberally on the page. In other words, sprinkle your content with the terms people might be searching for, and they will find you!
You can go keyword overboard with your keywords by keyword covering your keyword page, but that keyword idea is a bit of keyword overkill. Get the picture?
It also might backfire, as keyword "stuffing" is considered likely to be frowned upon by the search engines, and you might be penalized. A penalty is never a good thing. Being sent to the back of the search results is not something you want to happen. Use some logic and common sense in your approach to using keywords.
It's thought by some experts that about three to four percent of your words should be your various keywords for good search engine optimization. That is simply a guideline, however, and you don't have to strictly follow that rule. As a density level, the guideline is designed more to prevent overt keyword stuffing of the page, rather than to create optimal keyword density.
In fact, the amount of keyword saturation is a debate in and of itself. It is generally thought that Yahoo and MSN Search tolerate much higher keyword densities than Google. What you do need, however, is to optimize your search terms, by using them freely throughout your page content.
Keep your visitors in mind when writing your on page copy. Gaining high search rankings are of little value if visitors leave the page immediately due to unreadable wording. Think in terms of conversions into customers and clients, and focus less on the raw visitor numbers. Write for your visitors and not for the search engines.
If possible, fit your chosen search terms into your site’s title, description and URL. After that, place them in the headlines of your articles, and highly positioned on the page, whenever you are able. If you can put them in bold lettering, that emphasises their importance to the search engines as well.
When you write your content, be sure to use your targeted keyword(s) on your pages. In longer articles, you can slip them in as phrases two or three times. The search engine will calculate them to be important search terms for your search. As a result, your site should rank much higher for those words.
Be sure to include page topic relevant keywords in the title tags of each and every page on the website. Resist the common temptation to use only the company name as the title tag. If the business name must be used, place it after the relevant keywords in the title tags.
For really competitive keywords, where the search results return well over a million well optimized entries, it is recommended to optimize for only one keyword or phrase per page. Don't spread your page too thinly in highly competitive searches. Focus your efforts!
Use your chosen search keywords early and often.
Your site will rise higher in the various search engines.
Good content will also attract many one way incoming links...
Next: Then Links are the Queen... >>
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