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.

Properly notifying the major search engines of the various pages on your site can further improve the organic search engine traffic to your site. A common XML standard has been adopted by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN that makes mapping your site and getting the word out quick and convenient. There are a number of ways to build your XML sitemap, the most tedious of which is by hand. Mac users can use the Rage Google Sitemap Automator, which can not only generate the file for you just by providing the URL to your site, but it can even upload the file to your server and ping Google to let them know where the file is. Notifying Yahoo! has to be done manually via their Site Explorer tool, but the file doesn’t need to change at all. MSN is running behind trying to get a submission site set up, so although they are 100% behind the sitemap protocol, there is no means to submit your file.

WordPress users will be happy to know that an amazing Google Sitemap Generator plugin exists to create and submit your sitemap.xml to Google directly from your admin panel. Installation is simple, but a video tutorial has been created to walk your through the process should you get confused. The file it creates is also fine to submit to Yahoo! for indexing, making publicizing the structure of your site effortless.

Because blogs are updated frequently (hopefully that content is valuable to readers), are often rich with valuable links, and inherently are filled with keywords, search engines tend to like to direct people to them. Blogging can be a very valuable tool in driving traffic to a site. WordPress is one of my favorite blogging platforms because of its Web Standards complaint code, intuitive interface, and its rabidly loyal user-base who regularly develop useful plugins for the extensible platform. If you are concerned about SEO, there are a few of things you can do to make your WordPress blog more search engine friendly.

• Whenever adding links to your posts, be sure to include keyword rich titles in the "Title" field. The same goes when adding images, where you will want to include both title and description. Think of the alternative as well as the common words people might use to search for the content you are posting.
• In your WordPress admin panel, go to Options > Permalinks, and change the permalink structure to be date and name based. By choosing this option, the URLs that link to each blog post will include the keywords in the title of the post. Search engines look at the URL of a page for keywords when assessing relevance to a user's search, so this will boost your rankings on the keywords in the title of the post. Of course, you should think carefully when choosing the title for a post, considering the best keywords to use in the title. Don't try to stuff all keywords in the title, though. Keep it natural as search engines look for this.
• Modify your WordPress template to create more search engine friendly title tags. The title tag is seen by search engines as an important place to find out what a page is about. By default, WordPress writes something like this in the title tag for a permalink page: Blog Name ¬ª Blog Archive. That's not very descriptive. It would be better if it wrote the name of the post instead of "blog archive". To modify this your WordPress blog has to be self installed, not hosted on the WordPress server. Find header.php in wp-content > themes > themename (themename is the name of the theme you wish to modify). Open the file in a text editor or Dreamweaver. Change the default:
  PLAIN TEXT
  PHP:

  1. <title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

  to

  PLAIN TEXT
  PHP:

  1. <title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { echo " | "; the_title(); } ?></title>

It goes without saying that if you are designing your own WordPress theme, be sure to use Web Standards and do your best to make your site Section 508 or WCAG Accessible. This alone will provide more meaningful ways for a search engine to find out what your site is about as your content will use semantic markup, and will have more content to index in alt, title, and longdesc attributes and many other places when design with Accessibility in mind. South By Southwest had a two part great panel discussion with experts on both Web Standards and SEO in 2006, which they released as podcasts.

Part 1: Web Standards and SEO: Searching for Common | Part 2: Web Standards and Search Engines: Searching

Google has released a very useful tool for independent web sites called Google Co-op. You can build a custom search engine tool for your site and return results that don't compromise the design. Search is a much needed yet often either expensive or poorly implemented utility that is essential to many sites. With a price tag of free, and an exceptionally simple set up process, it is hard to refuse.

Rollyo, whose slogan is "Roll your own search engine", has also become popular for its simple setup, implementation, and ability to build a search engine for topics across specified sites. The amazing logo design is compliments of Dan Cederholm.