Keyword density

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears in a page. So if there are 500 words on a page and your keyword “pigdog” appears 50 times on the page, then the keyword density for the word “pigdog” would be 10 or 10%.

Keyword density is used by search engines to determine whether a web page is relevant to a keyword or keyword phrase.

It is believed that the first 2 or 3 paragraphs of a page have more importance than the rest of a page when search engines ‘look’ at a page. In fact the closer to the top of the page the better. So if you can have keywords as the first words of the body text of a page that this is better to search engines.

What should I Avoid?

Some things to avoid would be Search spaming or as Eric Convey calls spamindexing. Spamindexing is a tactic used by black-hat SEO or individuals that do not know better where they repeat unrelated keywords or keyword phrases in an attempt to manipulate SERPs (search engine result pages) so that their pages show up more frequently in SERPs. Many search engines check for spamdexing and remove suspected pages from their indexes. The goal of search engines is to provide useful or relevant content to searchers. Rule of thumb here is that you know if you are trying to ‘fool’ search engines. If you want better results, then you should just be honest and natural. Yes, there are some rules to follow that you normally would not but the bottom line is honesty is being rewarded by SEs today. Spamindexing renders search engines useless. Google, the dominant search engine today is a multi billion dollar company. The do not take spamindexing lightly. Do you have the resources to combat a company that has resources that billions of dollars provide? I, for one, do not.

Another tactic used is Keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the practice of placing within a page keywords specifically to raise the count, variety and ultimately density of specific keywords even though the keywords are in fact relevant. Yes, we need to understand some of the ‘rules’ used by SEs to show up more frequently on SERPs but you have to try to keep it as natural as possible. One of the ways SEs analyze keyword stuffing is to look at keyword density of other sites with similar keywords. If your site has an abnormally high keyword density then your page becomes ’suspect’ to keyword stuffing and you might be removed from SE indexes. One method used is to put hidden text that a site might use for say a “Andrea Bocelli” fan site, the talented opera singer, thus your page shows up on more SERPs. Please be aware that Keyword stuffing is considered unethical to SEs. Keyword stuffing is one of the main reasons that SEs have lowered the importance of meta tags and some totally ignore them. These tactics have made SEO more difficult for the common website. Today, most search engines rely on off-site links to a site to help ranks sites. One of the problems with off-site links is that the people that put links to other sites don’t always spend a lot of time ensuring that their anchor text to the site is optimum for that sites SEO or Ranking. However, on the other side of that scenario, if you really like a site, then yes you are going to put more relevant anchor text and general text around that link. ie: this site is a great site chalked full of SEO tips and one of the most useful sites for SEO tips I have seen. The author of this site is an experts on SEO issues and provides tips most will find useful as well as tips you might be unaware of. So, if you want to learn from an expert be sure to visit < some link> Andy’s SEO BOOK website < end of link > and increase your rankings and traffic.

Some other Tactics To Stay Away From or Risk being Banned

Scrapper Sites — These sites take various result pages content and make new ‘unique’ pages or on-the-fly content. These sites are sometimes known as ‘Made for Adsense’ sites.

Meta Tag stuffing — unrelated keywords in meta tags.

Doorway Pages (Gateway Pages) — Low quality pages stuffed with similar keywords or keyword phrases. Some pages have for the most part gibberish on the pages while others have a “click here to enter” link.

Invisible or hidden text — same color text as background, no frames,  Zero framesets or divs.

Splogs — Spam Blogs are fake blogs usually with Keyword rich fake content. These sites usually have a lot of advertisements on them. The user ends up on this splog, is bored to death and clicks on a relevant advertisement. If these sites have links to other splogs or sites then they fall into the category ‘Link Farm’.

What is Acceptable Keyword Density? 

If your site page has 500 words and 250 words are keywords, search engines will flag your page and your site may be banned. This is the wrong way to attain good rankings.

My Recommendation is to have a keywords density of 4-8% maximum and probably 3% to be safe.

Today, it is quite easy to check your keyword density as there are many tools out there that do this now. One sites tool I like is:
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

However, a quick search of Google on Keyword density or Keyword Density Tool will give you many to choose from.
 

What keywords should I use?

Before writing any html code for a webpage you should perform some sort of keyword analysis. Most website development totally ignores this step with corporate websites being guilty of this most. This step is most crucial in making sure that real people NOT in your industry find you. Knowing who you customers are helps.

Some questions you need to be able to answer are:

• Is your audience likely to search for industry standard terms or simple layman phrases?
• Which products/services have the highest profit margin? If you had just a $0.50 mark-up on a very popular product/service, could you sell enough online to make a profit? A product that is less searched but has a higher profit margin would be easier to obtain a search engine ranking and would yield higher revenues.
• Identify your biggest competitors. View competitor websites and see which products they appear to target; which search phrases do they have rankings for?

So here are a few steps you should follow to obtain the best keywords for your website.

Step 1: Real World Analysis

Send all your friends, family and colleagues an email or give them a sheet of paper with the following question on it stating specifically that you need 5 answers:

If you were searching for a web site with content identical to, or of the same theme as www.yourdomain.com, what word, or better word combinations (2-4 words) would you type into the search box? Please give 5 possible search terms or search term phrases that you believe are relevant to www.yourdomain.com content.

1 _______________
2 _______________
3 _______________
4 _______________
5 _______________
It is important to make sure you actually write a numbered list 1 to 5 leaving spaces for them to fill in! Otherwise you mightfind that you generally get just one or two possible keywords or phrases. As your audience to fill in all five.
Step 2: Analyze your competitors Keywords

You can best find your competitors websites by searching with what you believe to be your own top three keywords and taking a look at the source code of the top 5 web sites in the results. Paying special attention to the contents of the title tag (<title>…</title>) and of course the keyword <meta name=”keywords”… and description <meta name=”description”… meta tags is vital. These should help you get some keyword ideas. You can count on it that your competitors have done the same for their own sites.
Step 3: Analyze the most popular searches for your industry

Use keyword phrases instead of single keywords for high competition industries.

Plan for a maximum of only 3 keyword (phrases) per page.

Any more and you end up diluting the effect of any optimization for each of your keywords.

Understanding which keywords/Keyword phrases are being search by prospective customers is gold.

Chart of tools for popular searches
http://infopeople.org/search/chart.html

dwoz search trackers
http://www.dwoz.com/Default.asp?Pr=50

A good tool for Keyword suggestions is Overture
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

A Thesaurus might help identifying keywords for your industry.
http://thesaurus.reference.com/

Another Useful link is:
Google search Operators
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html

Effective Anchor Text Tips

Anchor text is the text you see that is linked. For example Paul’s Hit team, the text is obvious and link you go to is http://peuan.com. The Anchor text is Paul’s Hit Team.

Anchor Text is usually on links that link to your webpage. These are called inbound links and search engines use this text, especially Google, to determine what they show in thier SERPs. Anchor text has a huge effect on page rankings. In fact, with enough inbound links with effective anchor texts, a webpage can attain a high page ranking even if they do utilize any other forms of SEO. Anchor text is usually the deciding factor for very difficult and competitive SERPs.

So, to use anchor text effectively you need to ensure that the anchor text is relevant to the page it links to. It is not going to help a page about fish if the anchor text says something like “the best bikes on earth”. A site that links to another site with effective anchor text can benefit as well, however, this is not always the case. When you link to a page, if your intent is to give a value added backlink then using keywords that appear on the linked to page, preferably keywords in the h1 tag of the page or keywords in the first couple sentences would be most beneficial to both the linked page and your page you are linking from.

If you add other related anchor text links on the page that is linked to, you can benefit more, so add related links to your pages whether via a menu or linked body text in your page. As well if you link this page to itself helps too.

There are many problems with anchor text such as descriptive text, space limitations, etc. One of the problems is that you might only have so much space. You might be linking from a menu that is only so wide. Making the link descriptive might make your link wrap around and take away the professional look of your page. Even though SEs like this, us humans do not. We need to find a balance, if you were to write your pages so that search engines loved them, people surfing to your pages might not and quickly type in a new url or even worse just close the browser tab.

One of the biggest mistakes I see, which I myself am guilty of is having a ‘home’ link in menus, after all I do not want to compete or waste my valuable anchor text trying to rank in SEs for the word ‘home’. With that said, I do want my visitors to easily navigate through my site.. so naming my ‘home’ link ‘SEOBlog@Peuan Home’ would be more effective. This gives a perfect example of space limitations as I can’t afford a long name like that.

If you use an image as a header on your page as many sites do, then the ALT or alternative text of an image tag is the same as the anchor text of a link. Also, you might use an image to link to a site or you might provide a link with an image for people to easily link to your site. So I could make a nice ‘Home’ image for my menu and use descriptive alt text to get past this space limitation of a menu width.

Here is an example of alt text used on an image with rich descriptive text. To see the text put your mouse pointer over the image.

Even if you have images that are non-linked such as just pretty graphics you will benefit using the alt text option of the img src code.One last thing about links is to use the title option when linking. Use descriptive text and get the most of your links. Here is
the code used for the image link above. Notice the “title” in the href link and the “alt” text for the image. As you can see you have lots of space for descriptive text you can take advantage of without mucking up your page layout.

< a href=”http://seo.peuan.com/ts/in.php?id=8″ mce_href=”http://seo.peuan.com/ts/in.php?id=8″ title=”Backlinks Traffic to help boost your SE rankings“>< img src=”http://seo.peuan.com/ts/button.php?id=8″ mce_src=”http://seo.peuan.com/ts/button.php?id=8″ alt=”High Quality Backlinks for traffic and SEO via SERPs” border=”0″>< / a>

SEO Tips you should and should not do

There are supposedly “over 200 SEO factors” that Google uses to rank pages in the Google search results (SERPs). What are the search engine optimization rules? well, they are not public. We can guess and experiment to see what works but these factors are speculation only.

Google says “Sites’ positions in our search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results.”

PageRank
The main focus from Googlies perspective is PageRank which is a system to rank web pages. PageRank employs the democratic nature of the web by using as an indicator of an individual page’s value the links that link to a page. Based not so much on the volume of votes or links a page receives, but the quality or the importance of the page that links to a page. By having an important or high ranking page link to you helps to make your page “important” as well. With that said just because a page with a PageRank of say.. 7 links to your site does not automatically make your page more important. The linking page needs to be relevant to your page. So, a PageRank 7 page about gardening linking to a lower page ranked page about teaching English is not going to make the Teaching English page more important, and might actually hurt the teaching English page and vice versa.

Google uses text-matching techniques and goes beyond the number of times a term appears on a page examining dozens of aspects of the page’s content and the content of the pages that link to it to return good matches of high-quality websites that contain information relevant to your search.

In additions, Google does not sell SERP positioning. Yes they sell ads and place ads around the search results but they do not sell search engine results page placement.

Here is an article from Google on page rank http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

One of the main problems with Search engines and page design is that you need to keep in mind some of the rules that SEs use when developing your pages. The side effect is, If SEs did not exist and if you were to just design your page then you would not design it the way SEs like to see  your page designed. Thus the best solution is designing your page based on a combination of SE rules and not 100% on user or visitor desires.

Cloaking
Because of this some SEO developers employ Cloaking techniques. “Cloaking” is the showing of one version of a web page to search engines and another version to general users. Thus you show up in SERPs and when a user clicks on the link they get a different page than what the SE thinks it is linking you to. Cloaking is a fine technique to use when you want higher rankings in SERPs but a web page written to rank well under unrelated search queries runs a high risk of getting the entire domain banned. When a user searches for antique Duck decoys for sale and sees your cloaked link “Inexpensive Unique Antique Duck Decoys for Sale”, clicks the link and is directed to a page on acupuncture then this is a prime candidate for being banned. However, if you provide a nice graphical page on unique duck decoys that is not 100% SE optimized then there is a much reduced chance of being banned as users are less likely to complain or report your pages. In fact, the user should not even know they have been exposed to a cloaking technique. The purpose of a search engine is to provide Internet users with the information sought after. Keeping this in mind when you create your web page will ensure you higher rankings in SEs.

Duplicated Content
Duplicating content is an SEO tactic where a website owner creates multiple web pages with very similar content in hopes of receiving more visitors. The result of this is not only running an extremely high risk of being banned but the even more important risk of boring your visitors and loosing trust or being perceived as a garbage site.

Redirects
Redirects are used to gain higher rankings for a web page. Some of these ways work only in a few search engines while others may work in many. if you try to get your web page listed under a search query it does not belong to you risk having the page (or domain) banned.

Hidden Text
Another SEO Technique is the use of Hidden text, increasing Keyword density by use of hidden text or text the same color as the background page so the text is not seen. Search engines will rank pages in part by the number of times the search query is repeated on a web page. Web pages with a higher keyword density usually show up higher in results. This tactic is frowned upon by Ses and putting hidden keywords unrelated to your site is a good way to get banned. As mentioned before Google goes well beyond the number of times a term appears on a page examining dozens of aspects of the page’s content.

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are web pages created specifically to rank high in search engines. They are typically not created with human visitors in mind which defeats your purpose of getting visitors to revisit your page and puts you at risk of being banned by SEs.

The bottom line is to just create your pages using normal English even with a few errors, in fact a few errors might help your ranking and follow traditional on-page optimization techniques. include title Tag, header tags, page content, alt tags, meta description tag and meta keywords tag.

Page Title
The page title is the number one on page factor that they need to focus on. Page title tips:
• Limit the length of your page title to 65 characters or less.
• Incorporate keyword phrases into your page title.
• Grab the searchers attention.
• Each page should have a unique page title.
• Repeat your title tag in their H1 tags.
• Their title is the link that is shown in the search results of the search engine such as Google.
• Focus on click through rates and conversion rates.

So for example if your site focus’ on
a) Make Money Online
b) Make Extra Money

The title tag for your web page should look like this:

Make Money Online | Make Extra Money

Keep in mind that you should limit your keywords to a maximum of 3 or so on each web page because too many keywords in a title tag may be seen as spamming.

People often lie to get better results and because of this Google, understanding there is a problem, has decided to rely on off page optimization. That is, what the anchor text is in a link that links to your site from someone else’s site.

Header Tags
Header Tags are an HTML tag < h1 > </ h1 >. Use the H1 header tag as the title of the content on the web page. Do not confuse this with the < title > tag. Search engines read pages from top to bottom, so make sure your H1 tag contains the most important keyword(s). It should be placed at the top of the page which will be seen by your visitors. For sub-headings, you can create a H2 header tag and include your second most important keyword(s) into the H2 tag.

Page Content
Page Content should have your keywords sprinkled throughout the page. The closer to the top of the page the better. The first two sentences being the most important. Be sure to not over due it.. Keyword density of around 3 should be fine.

Alt Tags
Be sure to use Alt Tags for your images and the alt tag should contain your keywords. Don’t add similar keywords to each image as once again search engines may see them as spam.

Meta Description Tag
Writing a keywords-rich description will surely help in improving your website’s position as search engines will use your meta description tag as the short description of your website listed in their search result pages. The length of your description should not be too long, 2 to 3 sentences should be enough and the description encourage people to click the link to your website.

Meta Keywords
Yahoo is basically the only SE that utilizes meta keywords. Yahoo encourages webmasters to use meta keywords tag to improve their websites’ rankings. You can visit http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/ranking/ranking-02.html to read more about Yahoo’s webmaster guidelines. Add your keywords to the tag in order of importance and do not repeat the same keyword.

Speculated SEO Rules
Here is the speculation - educated guesses by SEO webmasters on some of the top webmaster forums. If you want to achieve a high ranking, the various confirmed and suspected Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Rules can be found here:

120 Factors List
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

Being a neophyte when it comes to SEO I realized that to fully understand what was currently going on in the field of SEO today that I would have to study efforts, results and problamatic side affects of techniques that have been utilized over the past 5 years as well as pinpoint, predict or develop current techniques.

Several different areas will need to be researched such as general webpage architecture, Keyword optimization, Search Engines guidelines, Theories of SEO, SEO Tools and Services and even marketing.

I started with researching general SEO Tools and Software packages that is currently being sold. This software is probably five years old and this is why it is being sold now.  Alot of the utilized what is now regarded as ‘black hat’ tactics or propegated usage that is for the most part currently frowned upon by the SEs.

In addition, I am currently researching optimization of basic pages for SEs. I will create a relatively short to-do type list that your pages should follow in the next couple days.

Software I have been researching are some auto-site generating software of various site types, Domain tracking software, Affiliate management and Product development packages, url and affiliate code masking/tracking packages, SEO Tools and suites, and pay-per-use services.

As I get a bit of knowledge on a particular software package I will write a short note or start a new category for it.

What’s an SEO?

Why do SEs hate SEO companies?

SEO is an abbreviation for “search engine optimizer” or “seach enging optimization.” Many SEOs, agencies and consultants provide valuable services for websites and their owners, from writing copy, giving advice on site architecture to helping find relevant directories in which their site should be submitted. On the other hand, there are also unethical SEOs which have given the industry a bad name through overly aggressive marketing efforts and utilzing techniques which attempt to unfairly manipulate search engine results in their favor.

Here are some tips that may help you distinguish between an SEO that will improve your site get your site dropped from search engine results altogether.

• Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.
• Choose wisely.
• Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.
• Be sure to understand where the money is being spent on.
• No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
• Make sure you’re protected legally.
• You should never have to link to an SEO.
• Talk to many SEOs, and ask other SEOs if they’d recommend the firm you’re considering.

What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

• Shadow domains
• Doorway pages

If you have any doubts, you should trust your gut feelings and feel free to walk away if the SEO:

• owns shadow domains
• puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
• offers to sell keywords in the address bar
• doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
• guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
• operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
• gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
• has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google