If you’ve been following along in this chapter so far,
you’ve already found out that your chosen keywords need to appear somewhere in
your content. (D’oh!)
Clearly, your Web site articles and other elements (stuff like video content)
should be targeting the topics your potential visitors are searching for —
which means your articles and other elements will have your keywords embedded
in them somewhere.
That’s pretty much a no-brainer. But if you take this a
little bit further, it gets a bit more interesting. Some folks might be tempted
to adopt what I call an in
for a penny, in for a pound strategy — if a little bit of something
is a good thing, a lot of something is a very good thing. Why settle for a
sprinkling of keywords on your Web site when, with a little bit of effort, you
can saturate your Web site with a veritable blizzard of keywords?
Why indeed? Because if you yield to temptation, you’re
guilty of committing keyword
spam, the act of deploying your keywords merely to increase search
engine results placement (bad!) rather than using them to provide site visitors
with desired information (good!). No one likes spam. You don’t like spam, your
potential Web visitors don’t like spam, and even spammers don’t like spam.
Keyword spam doesn’t even help you increase your search engine results
placement. In fact, Web crawlers that recognize keyword spam can get your
number and list your site deeper in search results, or worse, completely
de-list your site from those results.
The secret to having the right balance of keywords in your
site content is keyword
density — the ratio of keyword occurrences to the overall number of
words used on your site. Search engines vary on what’s acceptable for a keyword
density. Google, for example, looks for a keyword density of around 2 percent,
whereas Yahoo! and MSN look for a keyword density closer to 5 percent.
Remember, these are guidelines. So, if your keyword density is less than 5
percent, your page will still appear in Yahoo! and MSN search results. But over
2 percent and you might be penalized by Google.
Most
folks who do search engine optimization for a living tend to stay around the 2
percent keyword density mark to stay in Google’s good graces.
Time to picture what a 2 percent keyword density might
actually look like. Think of it this way: If the page contains an article
that’s 1,000 words in length, your selected keyword or phrase should appear no
more than 20 times in the article. Twenty seems like a small number until you
start adding keywords to articles and then you find that it takes some serious
work to spin 1,000 words around one word or phrase and still have everything
make sense and not sound repetitive.
The key here is to build an article around a specific
topic, like “credit monitoring,” but then not to go overboard using the keyword
or term — which in this case is “credit monitoring.” The article should be a
coherent information piece, and the use of the keyword or phrase will
automatically grow out of that. You just have to be careful not to stuff that
keyword or phrase into the article out of context in a misguided attempt to use
your selected keyword as often as possible.
One trick that might help, though, involves thinking
outside your body text box. It turns out that putting keywords into the body
text of your article is only half the work when you’re dealing with keywords.
Keywords should also appear in the title and the headings of articles you place
on your Web site. Titles and headings are also given additional weight in
search engine rankings because those are the elements on a page that catch a
visitor’s eye.
Think of it as being like reading a newspaper. Most people
scan a page of the newspaper before committing to reading any of it. They look
at headlines, paragraph headings, and bold or italicized text before they
decide which stories to read. Reading behavior is the same online — someone
clicks onto your page, scans the titles, headings, and specially formatted
sections of the articles there, and then decides to read deeper or click away.
Keywords in your titles and headings help pull readers into
the content of the article and help search crawlers classify your site by those
keywords. See, search crawlers are designed to weigh the appearance of keywords
in certain places — like titles and headings — just like people do. It’s
written into their programming, so you might think of a search crawler as the
ultimate reader.
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