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The website design and layout gives the first impression about your site. There are sites which are too fancy and regular net surfers just reach those sites and come out even without creating a single click. Search engines are very smart but after all, they are software and not human being, who can read the content of their interest. If you make your site too complicated, then the search engine would not be able to parse the content of your site properly, and finally indexing would not be efficient, which results in a low rank.
The actual page content should have a keyword density of about 10% and should weigh in at about 200 words - but there are as many opinions about this as there are SEO experts. Some say, keyword density should be 5% and some say it should be 20%. You can go with 10% which is good enough.
Here are a few guidelines that you should keep in mind while designing a web page.
You should have more text content than HTML elements.
No frames. They are the enemies of search engines, and search engines are enemies of frames.
No ads if possible. Because most of the ads use Java-Script which is not advised to be used.
No JavaScript. If you need JavaScript, call it from an external file rather than dumping the code in the HTML file. JavaScript drop-down menus prevent spiders from crawling beyond your homepage. If you use them, be sure to include text links at the bottom of the page.
Do not put anything in the page topic that does not fit perfectly.
No unnecessary directories. Keep your files as close to the root as possible.
No fancy stuff (Flash, Splash, Animated Gifs, Rollovers, etc.) unless absolutely necessary.
A keyword is a term that is used to match with the query a person enters into a search engine to find specific information. Most people enter search phrases that consist of two to five words. Such phrases may be called search phrases, keyword phrases, query phrases, or just keywords. Good keyword phrases are specific and descriptive. The following concepts related to keywords, help in optimizing the keywords on a web page.
This is calculated as how often does a keyword appear in a website title or description. You do not want to go overboard with frequency, however, since on some engines if you repeat a word too many times, you are be penalized for "spamming" or keyword stuffing. In general though, repeat your keyword in the document as many times as you can get away with, and up to 3-7 times in your list of metatags.
It refers to the number of keywords appearing on your web page compared to the total number of words appearing on that same page. Some search engines consider this while determining the rank of your website for a particular keyword search. One technique that often works well is to create some smaller pages, generally just a paragraph long that emphasizes a particular keyword. By keeping the overall number of words to a minimum, you can increase the "weight" of the keyword you are emphasizing.
It refers to the placement of keywords on a web page in relation to each other or, in some cases, in relation to other words with a similar meaning as the queried keyword. For search engines, that grade a keyword match by keyword proximity, the connected phrase home loans will outrank a citation that mentions home mortgage loans assuming that you are searching only for the phrase "home loans".
It is a measure of how early or high up on a page, the keywords are found. Having keywords in the first heading and in the first paragraph (first 20 words or so) on a page are best.
Where your keywords are placed on a page is very important. For example, in most engines, placing the keywords in the Title of the page, or in the Heading tags will give it more relevancy. On some engines, placing keywords in the link text, the part that is underlined on the screen in a browser, can add more relevancy to those words.
Here is a list of places where you should try to use your main keywords.
There are many different ways to find keywords for your website. Some good keyword ideas are:
The potential words, people would use to find your product or service.
The problems that your prospective customers may try to solve with your product or service.
Keyword tags on competitor's websites.
Visible page copy on competitor's websites.
Related search suggestions on top search engines.
Using an online tool such as Google Keyword Tool
By analyzing your website carefully and finding out proper keywords. This task can be done by expert SEO copywriters.
Pay attention to stemming for your keywords - particularly to what the root word is and what Google considers to be a match for that word, when optimizing pages over time.
You can do brainstorming to identify correct keywords for your site.
Google uses a feature called word stemming that allows all forms of the word - singular, plural, verb form as well as similar words to be returned for a given search query. So if someone types in "house plans", not only the pages that are optimized for that phrase but the pages that contain all variations of that phrase are returned. For example, "house plan", "house planning", "house planner". Hope you have some understanding on keywords and you also know how to identify them and where to use them. The next chapter explains how to optimize metatags for better results.
Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
