Pages and Keywords
By
now, you
probably understand that the most important thing you can do on the SEO
front
involves the words on your pages.
There
are three issues you need to
consider when placing keywords on a page:
How many words should be on a page?
Which words belong on what page?
Where should these be placed on the
page?
Page size
Ideally,
pages should be between 100 and 250 words. If it is shorter than 100
words,
Google and other search engines will tend to discount the page as a
lightweight. In addition, you want to include as many keywords as you
can
without throwing the content off-kilter.
With
less than 100 words, any
significant inclusion of keywords is going to look like keyword
stuffinga
verboten practice.
There's
nothing wrong with creating pages that are longer than 250 words.
However, from
the viewpoint of hosting lucrative advertising, lengthy pages waste
content;
250 words is about as many as will fit on a single monitor screen, so
your
visitors will have to scroll down to finish reading the rest of the
page if you
publish longer pages. You
might as well provide navigation to
additional pages for the content beyond the 250 words and gain the
benefit of
having extra pages to host advertising.
Choosing keywords
Beyond
the
mechanics of crafting sites and pages that are search engine friendly
lies
another issue: what search queries does your site answer? You need to
understand this to find the keywords to emphasize in your site
construction, a
very important part of search engine optimization.
It's
likely
that you'll want to vary keywords used in a page depending on the page
content,
rather than trying to stuff a one-size-fits-all approach into all the
pages on
your site.
If
the
answer is X, for example, what is the question? This is the right way
to
consider keyword choice. X is your web site or web page.
What
did
someone type into Google to get there?
As
you come
up with keywords and phrases, try them out. Search Google based on the
keywords
and phrases. Are the results returned by Google where you would like to
see
your site? If not, tweak, modify, wait for Google to re-index your site
(this
won't take too long once
you've
been
initially indexed) and try your search again.
Ultimately,
the best way to measure success is relative. It's easy to see how
changes
impact your search result ranking: just keep searching (as often as
once a day)
for a standard set of half-a-dozen keywords or phrases that you've
decided to
target. If you are moving up in the search rankings, then you are doing
the
right thing. If your ranking doesn't improve, then reverse the changes.
If you
get search results to where you want them (usually within the top 30 or
even
top 10 results returned), then start optimizing for additional keywords.
You
should
also realize that the success that is possible for a given keyword
search
depends upon the keyword. It's highly unlikely that you will be able to
position a site into the top 10 results for, say, "Google" or
"Microsoft," but trivial to get to the top for keyword phrases with
no results.
The
trade-off here is that it is a great deal harder to do well with
keywords that
are valuable, so you need to find a sweet spot: keywords where you
stand a
chance but that also will drive significant site-related traffic.
In a
society where feedback is ultimately
determined by financial incentive, an interesting approach to keyword
selection
is to see what words cost the most to advertisers. If you are
registered with
Google AdWords, you can use the AdWords tools to do just that and get
cost
estimates
for keywords and phrases
Keyword placement
The
text on your web page should include the most important keywords you
have
developed in as unforced a way as possible. Try to string keywords
together to
make coherent sentences.
Not
all text on a page is equal in importance. Generally speaking, besides
including them in the body of the page itself and in meta information,
you
should try to place your keywords in the following elements, presented
roughly
in order of descending importance:
Title
Putting
relevant keywords in the HTML title tag for your page is probably the
most
important single thing you can do in terms of SEO.
Headers
Keyword
placement within HTML header styles, particularly headers toward the
top of a
page, is extremely important.
Links
Use your
keywords as much as possible in the text that is enclosed by hyperlink
tags on
your site in outbound and crossbound links. Ask webmasters who provide
inbound
linking to your site to use your keywords whenever possible.
Images
Include your
keywords in the alt attribute of your HTML image tags.
Bold
If there is
any reasonable excuse for doing so, include your keywords within HTML
bold tags.
Keywords
higher up in a given page
get more recognition from search engines than the same keywords further
down a
page.
Keyword
placementsometimes called keyword
stuffing seems simple enough conceptually. You take the most
significant
keywords and place them in the HTML elements of your page that I've
just
highlighted. But looking at an actual example may help you understand
what
you
need to do.
To show
you an example of keyword
placement, I've turned to an SEO competition. SEO competitions take a
nonsense
phrase that, to start with, yields no Google search results when
entered as a
query. (The words that make up the nonsense phrase can be real words.)
At
the end
of a given time period, the
site that is first in Google's search results wins the contest.
Obviously,
keyword placement is not
the only technique employed by contestants, who also try to maximize
inbound
links. But keyword placement is an extremely important part of search
engine optimization,
as these contests prove, and one which you can easily implement.
