KEYWORDS,
RELEVANCY AND DENSITY
It's time to put on your search engine hat and begin thinking
like a search engine expert. First, you must
get a firm understanding of relevancy and density. They you need
to develop an effective list of keywords and properly
incorporate them into your site.
Relevancy
Your
searchable keywords must be relevant
to the contents of
your webpage, and to your webpage title.
This is referred to as keyword relevancy.
Search
Engines have several methods for determining how "relevant" your
website is to a specific search term. This usually
done automatically, however some search engines
in many
cases have humans check your site for keyword relevancy.
A few search engines display relevancy score along
side the search results. If you searched on the
terms "weight loss", a particular search engine
might come back with hundreds or thousands of matching
websites. The first
page of results would list sites with 100% relevancy,
then 99%, 98%, and so on. By the fourth or fifth
page,
sites listed may have a 60% relevancy.
It
is desirable to create multiple entry pages to your website,
each optimized for a specific keyword and/or a specific
search engine. Each entry page should be fine tuned with
proper relevancy between keywords, title and content.
Density
Keyword
density is ratio of keywords to all words on your
webpage. If your webpage has two words, and one is your keyword,
then your keyword density would be 50%. Search
engines ignore common words such as "a" and "the." When calculating
keyword density, some search engines factor in
the frequency of keywords, and the frequency of keywords in pages which
are linked to.
Keyword
density is a major factor in how high your site will be
listed in the search results. Therefore when designing
your site, work as many keywords as possible into your
text. Also pay attention to keyword density in your site's
title tag.
It
is desirable to create multiple entry pages to your website,
each optimized for a specific keyword and/or a specific
search engine. Each entry page should be fine tuned with
a high keyword density for a particular keyword.
Keywords
You
choice and use of keywords is key to your success with
the search engines. First, you'll need to figure out which
keywords people will use to search for products and services
like yours. Once you have a good list of keywords, you
should work these into your webpages. Refer to the above
sections in this lesson.
Sometimes
it can take weeks or months before you site shows up in
the search engines, so it is important to do things right
the first time.
Step
1: Make a Keywords List
Try and come up with keywords people will use to search
for products and services like yours.
Begin
by brainstorming. You can brainstorm by yourself or
with friends. Make a list of at least 50 words that
describe your Internet website. During your brainstorm
session, write down everything that everyone says, and
don't judge anything said as good or bad. Just brainstorm,
write quickly, and continue brainstorming.
Now
review your list, throw out the bad choices and narrow
your list to about 25 keywords. Sort your keywords by
descending order of importance. Look at high ranking
pages as a guide to figure out this order. Also identify
2 and 3-word phrases.
Step
2: Find Your Competitors' Keywords
Next make a list of keywords used by your competitors.
Combine the list of competitors keywords with that of
your own.
Step
3: Prioritize Your Keywords List
Prioritize your list, and continually prioritize it
as you go through the following steps.
Step
4: Find Commanding Combinations
Now go back to the popular search engines, and do searches
on combinations of words from your keywords list. Try
combining the first two words on your prioritized list,
then try other combinations.
What
you're looking for is something called commanding
combinations. You're looking for two things:
Combinations
which are likely to be searched by
prospects, Exclusive
combinations which return only a few listings
and give you more of an exclusive listing.
Add any commanding combinations you've found
to your keywords
list. Later, when you create your keyword
and description META tags, we'll use these
commanding combinations.
We'll also use them in the body of your HTML.
Title
Tag Keywording
Your
website's title is the single most important
factor in achieving good SE listings. A majority of SEs
will check your website's <TITLE> tag for keywords.
Use your top keywords for the majority of words in
your <TITLE> tag. If your top keywords
are:
pet
pet supplies
discount pet supplies
dog
cat
fish
then
a good title tag would look like this:
<TITLE>Discount
pet supplies for your Dog, Cat and Fish</TITLE>
Notice
that the majority of the title is comprised
of keywords (shown in boldface). Since 6 of the 7 words in the
title are keywords ("the" and "for" are common
words and are not counted), the keyword density
is 85%.
Keywords
in Content
Keywords,
Relevancy and Density it
is critical that you load your page with your
keywords to achieve a good keyword density.
Always
put as many keywords as possible before
your images. Depending on the layout of your page, this may
be easy or difficult. If you must have
a graphic or logo at the very top of your page, consider
placing small font keyword text above your
image; your logo will still be "near" the top of your
page, while favorably appealing to the SE's that
are looking for relevant "keywords" at
the top of your page. If you're in the
design stages of
your site, placement of keyword-loaded
text towards the very top of the page should
be an important
consideration.
