Aarron Walter

A critical factor in driving organic search engine traffic to your web site is the development of keyword density within your pages. Keyword density is the number of times a particular keyword shows up in a page in relation to the total number of words on the page. Keyword density is calculated with a simple formula expressed as follows: keyword occurrences in a page/number of words on page = keyword density percentage. Search engines will rank pages higher that appear to have a higher density of a search term, therefore choosing keywords to target and where to place them in a page is critical to driving visitors to your site.

There is a caveat with the development of keyword density in a page; keywords must occur naturally in your content. Ad hoc stuffing of a page with your keywords will not necessarily be rewarded by intelligent search engine algorithms like Google’s, which will detect a dishonest stacking of the deck. Instead, you want to write copy for your site that incorporates the keywords you are targeting, but don’t get so focused on keywords that your SEO quest compromises the quality of the content.

Now that you know the importance of keywords, how do you select them and where do you place them in your pages? Fortunately there are some wonderful tools to help you choose keywords, and then evaluate the density in your pages. As for where to place the keywords, that can be solved with a simple list of priority areas that search engines value that will clue you into the hot places. A general rule of thumb when selecting keywords is target words that are as specific to your content as possible, and not already strongly controlled by major web competitors. For instance, if you tried to target the word “pottery”, chances are even with your best SEO efforts you will not out rank Pottery Barn, or the many other major businesses already targeting the term. Instead target a word like “raku”, which may be more relevant to your site content, and will result in visitors to your site with greater interest in what you have to offer. Though there may be fewer searches for this term, the visitors it does generate are more likely to make a purchase! An understanding of the Long Tail theory will further shed light on the subject.

The tools I use to research keywords are WordTracker.com, NicheBot.com, and Overture (now owned by Yahoo!). Each of these tools access global search data to see how often your keyword is searched for. Some will even tell you who else is targeting your keyword with paid advertising. You can get suggestions for related keywords or key phrases that may be more ideal to target. These tools are simple to use, and will tell you pretty definitively which words are going to give you the best results. I will say that there is a bit of science, and a bit of directed guess work that goes into keyword selection. After all, can we really predict what users will be searching for in the coming months? Not even with a crystal ball, but researching your keywords and phrases will get you a whole lot closer to success than blind guessing.

Once you have identified your keywords, you want to make sure they show up in the following priority one places on your pages:

• The title tag, close to the left but not the first word
• Heading tags such as h1, h2, and h3
• Meta tags, even though Google does not gauge these as a reliable source of finding out what your page is about, other search engines do
• In your URLs
• In internal and external link labels
• The first few lines of your page

You should also try to place your keywords and phrases in these locations:

• Alt text
• Title attribute text
• Strong and emphasis tags
• Other heading tags
• Longdesc text
• Summary attributes
• Caption tags
• In filename of CSS files or image files

Other general guidelines include:

• Keep HTML file size small, preferably below 20k
• Do not require JavaScript to navigate the site as search engine spiders won’t be able to spider all pages
• Use standards compliant HTML and CSS, and make all attempts to validate your pages as Section 508 or WCAG complaint
• Text should outweigh HTML
• Use an HTML template engine of some flavor as search engine spiders tend to skip over redundant HTML from page to page

This list is not exhaustive by any stretch, but it will certainly get you pointed in the right direction to success with search engine optimization. Once you have your keywords in place you can use a keyword density checker to evaluate your success.

Written 1 year, 8 months ago in Findability, SEO. | Respond | Comments Feed: RSS 2.0 | Trackback