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| The Advance Of Algorithms –
New Keyword Optimization Rules |
| Posted: 25-04-2006 |
| Author: Matt Jackson |
Maintaining and marketing a
website can be a difficult task especially for those who
are inexperienced or who have very little experience.
SEO rules are constantly changing and even then, many
SEO professionals disagree on the actual specifics required
to optimize a website. This is in no small part due to
the search engines themselves.
Major search engines like Google are constantly striving
to ensure that sites at the top of their result pages
offer invaluable information or service to their visitors.
However, webmasters who are looking to make quick money
while offering very little quality content are always
finding new ways to beat the search engines at their own
game. For this reason, search engines regularly change
the methods they use to determine relevancy and importance
of your site.
Evolving Search Engines
The first step you should take is to ensure that your
website will do an effective job of turning visitors into
money. The content needs to be optimized so that both
search engine visitors and human visitors both deem it
to be a useful website. Once upon a time, effective optimization
entailed cramming content with as many keywords as possible
and while this once generated good search engine results
it invariably put visitors off. It is also now frowned
upon and penalized as being spam by all of the major search
engines.
The Evolution And Improvement Of Algorithms
Search engines use specific algorithms to determine the
relevance of your website. The calculations from these
algorithms determine where on the search engine result
pages your website will appear. In order to keep the unscrupulous
webmasters guessing and ensuring that results are always
up to date, major search engines regularly update their
algorithms.
Recent Advances
The result of some of the most recent changes has seen
the impetus move away from optimizing websites for search
engines and instead the algorithms are now geared to promote
websites that give true value to visitors. They’re not
only changing, they are evolving into more intelligent
and accurate algorithms. While the use of keywords based
around the relevant topic is still important, it is also
important to ensure that visitors are your main priority.
Keyword Optimization
Keyword optimization is now more heavily guarded. Those
who include keywords too often will have their sites labeled
as spam, whereas not enough instances of the appropriate
keyword means you won’t receive the desired results. However,
the algorithms have become particularly smart and as well
as the keywords you want to target you should include
other relevant keywords. Including inflexions of keywords
is one excellent way to ensure that your site is deemed
to be relevant. Inflexions are slight changes to your
keyword. For example, inflexions of the keyword “advertising”
include advertise, advertised, advertisement, etc…
Keyword Inclusion
Weight is also given to keywords that are included in
certain sections of a page. These sections include the
title tag, meta tags (only relevant to smaller search
engines now), header tags, image alt tags and formatting
tags (e.g. keywords in bold or italicized) of your text.
With image alt tags and hyperlink title tags it is important
that you don’t simply fill these with keywords because
this will be ignored at best, and penalized at worst.
Natural Content Writing
One of the most effective ways to ensure that your site
is keyword optimized properly is to write the content
naturally first. Once you have done this, go through and
ensure that any relevant keywords are included throughout
the text. Only place them where they would appear naturally
and remove them from anywhere where they appear awkward.
Once you’ve written the content you should also check
the remaining factors to ensure everything is ok.
SEO Keyword Checklist
Below is a keyword checklist to ensure that you have fully
optimized your web pages to the current, generally accepted
search engine algorithm rules.
URL
Get your primary keyword as close to the beginning of
the URL as possible.
Title Tag
The title should be between 10 and 50 characters and include
one or more keywords while still being descriptive.
Description Meta Tag
The description meta tag should be insightful and useful
but it should also contain one or two of your more important
keywords.
Keyword Meta Tag
It makes sense that you should include all of your keywords
in the keyword meta tag. Do not include any words that
don’t appear in the body of your text.
Keyword
Density
Your content should be made up of all of your keywords
and other text. A total keyword density (all keywords)
of around 15% to 20% is the maximum you should aim for
and anything less than 5% is unlikely to yield good results.Density
for a single keyword should be between 1% and 7%. 1% seems
too low, and 7% a little too high. Wherever possible aim
for approx 5% with the primary keyword and 3% with secondary
and subsequent keywords.
Header Tags (e.g.
H1 and H2 tags)
More weight is given to keywords that appear within H1
tags, then H2 tags and so on.
Text Formatting
Fonts (e.g. strong, bold and underline)
This may not offer much weight in algorithms, but generally
if you bold the first instance of your keywords and the
last instance of your primary keyword you should see some
positive results.
Beginning Of Text
The closer you can get your keywords to the beginning
of your page content the better. Try to include your primary
keyword within the first sentence or two and also within
the last paragraph.
Key-Phrases As Whole
Phrases
If you are targeting Internet Marketing as a key phrase
then do not split the words up if possible. Some effect
is noticed if the words are split, but much more benefit
is received by including the phrase as a whole.
Alt Text
Include your keyword at least once in the Alt tag of any
images. Ensure that the text is relevant to the image
and gives some information.
About WebWiseWords
WebWiseWords is a freelance copywriting service offering
any style of writing on any topic. Whether your business
needs a website content copywriter, an article copywriter,
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style of copywriter WebWiseWords gets your words written.
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