After you have chosen the keywords that describe your site and are supposedly of interest to your users, the next step is to make your site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for your target keywords. Keyword density is a common measure of how relevant a page is. Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. Suggested concentration 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. Try the Keyword Density Checker below to determine the keyword density of your website. Although there are no strict rules, try optimizing for a reasonable number of keywords – 5 or 10 is OK. If you attempt to optimize for a list of 300, you will soon see that it is just not possible to have a good keyword density for more than a few keywords, without making the text sound artificial and stuffed with keywords. And what is worse, there are severe penalties (including ban from the search engine) for keyword stuffing because this is considered an unethical practice that tries to manipulate search results.
Feb 3, 2010
Choosing the Perfect Keywords to Optimize
Appear that time when you could easily top the results for a one-word search cycle is centuries ago. Now, when the Web is so tightly populated with sites, it is next to impossible to achieve constant top ratings for a one-word search cycle. Achieving constant top ratings for two-word or three-word search strings is a more reasonable goal. If you examine closely the dynamics of search results for popular one-word keywords, you might notice that it is so easy one week to be in the first ten results and the next one to have fallen out of the first 30 results because the competition for popular one-word keywords is so fierce and other sites have replaced you. You can include one-word strings in your keywords list but if they are not backed up by more terms; do not dream of high ratings. For instance, if you have a site about cat, “cat” is a mandatory keyword but if you do not optimize for more words, like “cat owners”, “cat breeds”, “cat food”, or even “canine”, success is unlikely, especially for such a popular keyword. The examples given here are by no means the ultimate truth about how to optimize a cat site but they are good enough to show that you need to think broad when choosing the keywords. When you start optimization, the first thing you need to consider is the keywords that describe the content of your site best and that are most likely to be used by users to find you. Ideally, you know your users well and can guess properly what search strings they are likely to use to search for you. One issue to consider is synonyms. Very often users will use a different word for the same thing. For instance, in the example with the cat site, “canine” is a synonym and it is for sure that there will be users who will use it, so it does not hurt to include it now and then on your pages. But do not rush to optimize for every synonym you can think of search engines themselves have algorithms that include synonyms in the keyword match, particularly for languages like English, German.
As substitute, think of more keywords that are likely to be used to describe your site. Thinking thematically is especially good because search engines tend to rate a page higher if it belongs to a site the theme of which fits into the keyword string. In this aspect it is important that your site is concentrated around a particular theme i.e. cats. It might be difficult to think of all the relevant keywords on your own but that is why tools are for. For instance, the Website Keyword Suggestions Tool below can help you to see how search engines determine the theme of your web site and what keywords fit into this theme. You can also try Google's Keyword Tool to get more suggestions about which keywords are important and which are not. Choosing the keywords to optimize for, you need to consider not only their relevancy to your site and the expected monthly number of searches for these particular keywords. Very often narrow searches are more valuable because the users that come to your site are those that are really interested in your product. If we go on with the dog example, you might discover that the “adopt a cat” keyphrase brings you more visitors because you have a special section on your site where you give advice on what to look for when adopting a cat. This page is not of interest of current cat owners but to potential dog owners only, who might be not so many in number but are your target audience and the overall effect of attracting this niche can be better than attracting everybody who is interested in cats in general. When you look at the numbers of search hits per month, consider the unique hits that fit into the theme of your site.
As substitute, think of more keywords that are likely to be used to describe your site. Thinking thematically is especially good because search engines tend to rate a page higher if it belongs to a site the theme of which fits into the keyword string. In this aspect it is important that your site is concentrated around a particular theme i.e. cats. It might be difficult to think of all the relevant keywords on your own but that is why tools are for. For instance, the Website Keyword Suggestions Tool below can help you to see how search engines determine the theme of your web site and what keywords fit into this theme. You can also try Google's Keyword Tool to get more suggestions about which keywords are important and which are not. Choosing the keywords to optimize for, you need to consider not only their relevancy to your site and the expected monthly number of searches for these particular keywords. Very often narrow searches are more valuable because the users that come to your site are those that are really interested in your product. If we go on with the dog example, you might discover that the “adopt a cat” keyphrase brings you more visitors because you have a special section on your site where you give advice on what to look for when adopting a cat. This page is not of interest of current cat owners but to potential dog owners only, who might be not so many in number but are your target audience and the overall effect of attracting this niche can be better than attracting everybody who is interested in cats in general. When you look at the numbers of search hits per month, consider the unique hits that fit into the theme of your site.
Keywords – The Most Imperative Point in SEO
Keywords are the most significant SEO item for every search engine actually they are what search strings are matched against. So you see that it is very important that you optimize your site for the right keywords. These seem easy at first but when you get into more detail, it might be a bit puzzling to correctly determine the keywords. But with a little research and thinking the problem of selecting the right keywords to optimize for can be solved.
Variation between the Major Search Engines
While the vital principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. Different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Yahoo! are purposely made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize with awareness.
There are many examples of the variation between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and MSN, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine the older, the superior, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets established to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!
There are many examples of the variation between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and MSN, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine the older, the superior, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets established to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!
How Search Engines Effort
The first basic truth you need to learn about SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be understandable for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from smart human being that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief clarification is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.
First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by e piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been personalized. Sometimes crawlers will not visit your site for a month or two, so during this time your SEO efforts will not be rewarded. But there is nothing you can do about it, so just keep settle down.
What you can do is to check what a sycophant sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.
After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Fundamentally, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you to get higher rankings.
When a search application comes, the search engine processes it like to compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search series, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search series.
There are various algorithms to work out relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give dissimilar search results pages for the same search sequence. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, ASK.com etc. occasionally change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your challenger) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.
The last step in search engines movement is retrieving the results. Fundamentally, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most applicable to the least relevant sites.
First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by e piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been personalized. Sometimes crawlers will not visit your site for a month or two, so during this time your SEO efforts will not be rewarded. But there is nothing you can do about it, so just keep settle down.
What you can do is to check what a sycophant sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.
After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Fundamentally, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you to get higher rankings.
When a search application comes, the search engine processes it like to compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search series, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search series.
There are various algorithms to work out relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give dissimilar search results pages for the same search sequence. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, ASK.com etc. occasionally change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your challenger) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.
The last step in search engines movement is retrieving the results. Fundamentally, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most applicable to the least relevant sites.
Beginning – What Is SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often measured the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does help in the encouragement of sites and at the same time it requires some technical knowledge at least acquaintance with basic HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines arrangement with text. Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results. One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this does not robotically guarantee you top ratings but if you neglect basic rules, this certainly will not go unnoticed. Also, if you set realistic goals for Example to get into the top 50 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, you will feel happier and more satisfied with your results. Although SEO helps to increase the traffic to one's site, SEO is not advertising. Of course, you can be included in paid search results for given keywords but basically the idea behind the SEO techniques is to get top placement because your site is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay. SEO can be a 30-minute job or a permanent activity. Sometimes it is enough to do some generic SEO in order to get high in search engines for instance, if you are a leader for rare keywords, then you do not have a lot to do in order to get decent placement. But in most cases, if you really want to be at the top, you need to pay special attention to SEO and devote significant amounts of time and effort to it. Even if you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work and which items are most important in SEO.
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