Welcome!
There are numerous opinions as to what
webmasters should and/or should not do in regards to tweaking websites
to get the search engines all excited enough to perhaps establish a
decent search result. And we are no different. Just research all you
can, and make your own decision as to what makes sense. Keep in mind all
SE's are constantly evolving, so what works one day, might not work the
next. Good luck, and happy optimizing!
Optimizing Your Page Content
In previous articles, I have endeavored to
provide a beginner's guide to making these changes; now it's time to
turn our attention to perhaps one of the most important aspects of any
SEO campaign, optimizing your page content.
So, where do we start? What is the most
important change a Webmaster can make to a page in order to improve
search engine positioning? Keywords, baybee! When researching your industry, competitors and most requested
search terms, you identified the keywords that are the most regularly
used by your target audience. You've used them in your title and Meta
tags, but their most important use is in the actual page content, the
text you display on the pages you are trying to get positioned.
Include Your Targeted Search Terms
So many times, I have seen web sites that fail
to mention any of the search terms they are trying to achieve rankings
for. They'll have lots of graphics and may also have good levels of text
on the page, yet the company still fails to include the exact phrase
that is important to them. For example, if you're trying to achieve
rankings for the term "desktop computer
supplies," make sure your content has that exact phrase present in
it. It is of little benefit to say something along the lines of, "The best selection of accessories for your home
computer" when trying to target "desktop
computer supplies ." While you may pick up points for having text
that is on the same theme, you won't achieve your best search engine
rankings unless you include liberal occurrences of the exact phrase you
are trying to target.
Checking Keyword Density
Your next question is likely to be "How often should I mention each search term?" A
well-optimized page should include at least 250 words of text. Within that text, aim to
achieve between 5% - 15% frequency for the
term you are trying to target. Make sure that you place your most
important search terms in text located towards the top of your page and
also try not to target more than 5 phrases within any block of text (the
more phrases you try to target, the more text you need to achieve a high
frequency).
Also look for opportunities to make links out of
search terms located within your page text. In the example of "desktop
computer supplies," consider making one of the occurrences of this
phrase a hyperlink to the most relevant page within your website; it
will give you a little push in your ranking efforts.
The
Impact Of Keyword Proximity
If you're unable to include the exact phrase
within your page text, which can often happen when the targeted search
term is not used in the course of normal syntax, try at least to keep
the words within close proximity. For example, you could use "Discounted supplies for desktop computers. "
While it is not as valuable as including the exact phrase, it at least
contains the targeted words, albeit in a different order. The search
engines, while preferring to display pages that match search terms
exactly, have shown a propensity to display web pages that have the
targeted words within close proximity.
Search
Terms Should Be Pervasive
While paragraphs of text within your web page
offer the best opportunity to include search terms, make sure you don't
miss the many other opportunities within your content. For example, look
at the text contained within the headings of each page and make sure
they contain the most relevant search term for your content. Also,
consider the navigation menu that you use and look for instances where
you can include a relevant search term. How about the text you use under
each product description? I've seen websites where the most dominant
two-word phrase on a product page was "Sale
Price. " Ouch!
As you can see, the text you use on each page is
vitally important when trying to achieve better search engine
positioning. However, adding keywords to your content is not enough to
get your web site to the coveted "#1" position. There are many other
factors that need to be considered, including many that don't involve
the content on the page, but since we are looking at page content, here
are a few quick tips:
:: Don't bury your keyword-rich content
at the bottom of the page. The search engines consider where the text is
located on a page when determining your site's relevancy. Google will
believe that text pushed to the bottom of your site, in a small font,
can't be that relevant to your business.
:: Don't overdo things. While having no
search terms in your text is disastrous, having too many could have an
equally negative impact. Stick to your 5-15% frequency.
:: Remember the user experience. While
your SEO efforts will help improve your search engine rankings, don't
sacrifice the usability of your web site. Ensure that it is easy to
navigate and that all of your keyword-rich text still makes sense to the
average visitor.
:: Add one or two targeted search terms
to the ALT tags of any image that links to another page within your
website. Search engines have shown they consider ALT tag text when the
image contains a link to another page.
:: Don't go overboard with the use of
"H1 " tags or bolded text. While they can
help improve your search engine positioning, less is more.
Walk
Before You Run
Hopefully, the above advice will assist you in
modifying your most important pages to increase search engine
visibility. When you feel you have made all the basic changes to the
text of your site, you'll find many articles that discuss fine-tuning
your page layout and content. Search engine optimization is an ongoing
process, and you can drive yourself crazy, if you try to optimize every
single aspect of your web site. Simply remember to keep your site
relevant and make sure you have covered all the basics before advancing
to more complex techniques.
Common SEO Jargon
Spider
Term for computer program operated by a search
engine company that is used to visit pages on the internet, record
information about words and keywords on the page, and store the data in
an archive or index.
Search Engine
A website that organizes webpages according to
keywords, and relevancy to deliver choices to a web user in response to
his or her individual search query terms.
Query or Search
This process is composed of entering keywords
related to ones interest at the moment in a given search engine's search
box and retrieving the results. Every time one enters a new keyword a
new query or search is occuring. One does not have to click on a result
from a query for it to count as a query or search.
Proximity Search
Term for a specialized search in which one can
search for a given phrase found together such as "cars for sale"
specifically. A proximity search will deliver a phrase found together
while ignoring the individual keywords if they are found far away from
each other on a page.
Relevancy
Subjective term referring to the relative quality
of search engine results in response to a given user's query. A search
engine that results in more searchers finding what they want for a given
search has a greater relevancy.
Stemming
Term for a practice by search engines that results
in root words and their endings resulting in the same results being
returned from a search engine. For example a search for car or cars in
many engines due to stemming would return the same result. For terms
such as walk walking and walked via stemming some search engines would
return the same search results.
Case Sensitive
Term for a practice deployed by some search engines
in the past that results in capitalized and lower case words yielding
different results. For example a case sensitive search engine would
return different results for CAR and car.
Stop Words
Common words like of, and, the, but that are found
often in documents and as such are not used as keywords by search
engines for ranking purposes. In short the words are ignored.
SERPS
Acronym for Search Engine Result Pages which is
frequently used by search engine optimizers to refer to the actual
search engine results. For example saying a given engine has updated
SERPS means the search engine now delivers different results than
previously due to a larger number of pages in the search engine index,
changes in relevancy ranking, or for some other reason.
Googling
Term for the practice where by someone types
another person's name in the Google search engine to see just what pops
up. Googling often includes a person searching for their own name or
searching for another name to see if anything "interesting" pops
up.
Google Dance
Term frequently used by members of the
Webmasterworld Message Board that is used to refer to the time during
which Google is in the middle of its monthly update. During this time
period search queries may result in differeint results from time to time
and all three Google's Google1, Google 2 and Google 3 which are used for
testing purposes and can be used to see how the update may be affecting
how things are ranked.
Google Bombing
This term refers to the use of linking campaigns
designed to make a given site appear under a given keyword sometimes
negatively. If lots of sites link to a given site with text surrounding
the link containing a negative keyword then the site itself will appear
higher in google results for that negative term through no action of
their own. For example if lots of sites link to a given company and
describe it as "Evil Company" then the company could be associated with
evil just by its prominent return in search engine results on Google.
Cloaking
Term referring to a practice used by search engine
optimizers in which a different keyword rich page is delivered to search
engine spiders while the regular real page is delivered to actual human
visitors. With cloaking the ip of a visitor to a site determines what
version of a page it receives. Ip's from search engines get
mathematically optimized keyword pages while surfers get regular pages.
Using Ip's to determine content delviered is known as Ip based
delivering ad it used during cloaking. Site's found to be cloaking are
often dropped from search engines entirely as the process is considered
dishonest.
Invisible Text
This refers to the use of text in a color that can
not be seen relative to the background of a site or text too smale for a
human to be able to see. Invisible text is used by some in an attempt to
gain additional keywords to rank for on search engines. Search engines
generally lower the rankings of sites they find doing this.
Metasearch
Term for a search engine that gets its results from
multiple search engines and combines them in some format that in theory
would take the best results from multiple search engines for a
presentation of the best overall results.
Web Directory
Term for a category based organized scheme of the
web usually maintained by humans. Popular webdirectories include Yahoo,
Zeal/Looksmart, and ODP.
ODP
Acronym for the Open Directory Project which is
owned by AOL/Netscape and consists today as a volunteer run directory of
the web with a few AOL/Netscape staff overseeing the project. ODP data
can be used freely with copyright credit given and is in wide use on
search engines such as Gooogle, AOL, and Netscape and that gives the
directory its importance.
Zeal
Term for the noncommerical portions of the
Looksmart directory that are maintained by volunteer editors known as
Zealots along with paid Looksmart editors. Zeal is the only way for
noncommercial sites to get into Looksmart and consequently gain
prominence on MSN search which uses Looksmart data.
Robots.txt
Term for a file placed on ones website or webserver
that will block almost all search engines from visiting the pages of the
site or server if set up appropriately or it can block selective search
engines or rogue spiders. Just a text file named Robots.txt specifying
the robots or search engine spiders to be ignored in a format as
explained at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion-admin.html is enough
to limit search engines from further visiting a site. Robots.txt files
are mainly used to limit search engines from viewing too many pages on a
site if search engine visits and not real visitors are taking the
majority of a site's resources. If you want traffic from search engines
you should not upload a file named Robots.txt file anywhere on your
site.
Anchor Text
Term for the linked text description of a hyperlink
to another website. For example the fake link A really bad site has "a
really bad site" as the anchor text which leads to the actual site which
is fake in this instance. The anchor text heavily influences the
keywords the site will rank well on for search engines like google. If
lots of sites link to this site with the same anchor text then the site
might appear very prominenty for the phrase "a really bad
site."
