Seach Engine Optimisation - Keywords
Selecting your keywords
Know the question before someone asks. Any successful
search engine optimization campaign starts with keywords. Know the
keywords people search for, and you know the questions they're asking.
Over 80% of all online transactions begin with a keyword search.
To compete, you need to target all the relevant keywords.
The volume of searches being conducted on a keyword plays a big part
in the keyword selection process and optimization strategy. A popular
source for determining the number of times per month that a keyword
is being queried is the Keyword
Selector Tool from Yahoo! This tool reports on the searches done
in a previous month for Yahoo!, MSN and other search engines in the
Yahoo! SM marketing network – which means that you are seeing
on average 48% of the searches done in North America and Australia.
The ideal keywords are those that are highly relevant, have a high
search count and low competition. What constitutes a high search count
can vary greatly from industry to industry and from niche market to
niche market.
Another excellent tool is KeywordDiscovery,
it can tell you the search phrases people use to find products and
services, as well as the search terms that drive traffic to your competitors.
KeywordDiscovery compiles keyword search statistics from over 180 search
engines world wide, to create the most powerful Keyword Research tool.
Optimizing your keywords
Once you select your keywords, it's time to apply them
to your Web pages. The page text is the most important aspect of
your page to the search engines. Search engines give more weight
to the titles and headings, or emphasized text. That's why the first
200 words are so important. It's also the basis of the top-left-down
keyword optimization strategy. Besides the 200 words and emphasized
text on your page, concentrate on making sure your body text contains
keywords.
Here's what you should optimize and why:
- Title tag (<title>): All SEO experts agree
the title tag is the most important tag on the page. It's the first
word or words the spider encounters and it's the title of your page's
listing in the SERPs. Use this tag to your advantage; that is, make
sure your keywords are listed here.
- Meta description (<meta name="Description"): The
meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your
page in search engine results.
- Body text (<body>): Ensure your keywords
are in the page text at approx 7 percent density. The top 200 words
of your page are the most important. A good total number of words
is 500.
- Page heading and subheadings(<h1, 2,
3>):
The page headings are the next most important features on the page.
The page headings and subheadings should contain your keywords.
- Text in bold and/or italics (<strong><em>):
Words in bold and italics will also influence your ranking. These
tags tell the user the highlighted terms are important to the page,
and the spider sees them the same way. Make sure the emphasized words
are keyword rich.
- Images <img alt="keywords": Search
engine robots can not read images vaild html includes the image alternative(mouseover}
text this should contain your keywords.
- Links <a title="keywords":
When you link to a page, use the keywords not the url as the anchor
text. Similar to images links may have mouse over text or title.
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