Search Engine Optimization - Part 3
Article ID: KB101554
In the never ending quest for top search engine placement; this
month's focus is keyword placement, relevancy and density. Last
month's PM Newsletter helped you to create a list of keywords for
your "target" audience. With your list of keywords in hand, you are
ready for the next step... placement.
The placement of "keyword text" on your web page before
your images is important because search engines don't value images.
They are looking for text. The trick: Place meaningful keyword text
at the top of your page before your image(s) and still artfully
placing your logo close to the top of your web. Take a look at the
PixelMill home page graphic below. It has a very small image before
the "keyword text" at the top of the page designed to blend into the
browser toolbar.
It is very important that your keywords are relevant to
the contents of your web page. Your title must be relevant to these
keywords and your web site must be relevant to both the content
between your <title> tags as well as the keywords that you're using
in your body text. Remember, you will need to put the best
keywords first, the second best next and then down the line with the
rest of your list.
The next step is to analyze your page's keyword density.
Keywords and key-phrases need to be placed as frequently as possible
in the body of your page - that is, between the <body> </body> tags,
and remember - keywords in graphics can't be seen by a search engine
"crawling" your site. The number of times your keywords appear in
the body of your page will be compared to the keywords in your
<meta> tags and a score for relevancy will be generated. Bottom
line, the more times you use your keywords on your page the higher
the score for density will be.
Don't do this!
"Spamdexing" - i.e., repeating keywords over and over in text
at the top of the page and/or at the bottom of the page in very
small letters, i.e. <font size=1> or headline <H6>. Most search
engines will drop your ranking even if the keywords are relevant and
stuffing irrelevant keywords into your pages will likely get your
domain banned from most search engines.
Invisible text: many search engines automatically reject any
pages having the same exact background color as the font
color. Note: one way around this, is to use very similar colors
but NOT exact colors.
Stay tuned - next month we will tackle the mystery of meta
tags.
Next: Meta Tags
Contributors
Greg Snow:
Greg is the CEO of Advantrics LLC, which is the parent company
for PixelMill and
Vivid Office. Greg has an
incredible background in FrontPage Development and Research, and
keeps up to date with the latest Search Engine News. He is the
author of the Search Engine article series from the PixelMill
newsletter.
Greg Snow, PixelMill Newsletter, Volume 2 - Issue 2 : 02/01/2002
Back to top
Was this helpful?
Please rate this article:
Email address: (not required)
(Please provide your email address if you would like PixelMill support to follow-up with you about your comment. You're email address is NOT REQUIRED to submit a comment.)
Comments: (How can we improve this article?)
Clicking "Submit" will not clear this page.
link to this page:
http://www.pixelmill.com/support/al1077/kb101554.htm
permalink to this article:
http://www.pixelmill.com/support/kb101554.htm
Back to top