Search Engine Optimization: Keyword Saturation

Keywords

This quick lesson will teach you the basics of how to appropriately use keyword on your webpage in order to maximize your ranking with search engines.

But first, what are keywords? Keywords are anything you type into a search engine in order to tell it what you are looking for. Keywords, or keyphrases, can go from the very generic, such as "cameras", to the very specific, like "pentax optio m40 8 megapixel digital camera". The more specific the words, the fewer results you will get and the more likely you will find what you want.

So what does this mean if you are designing your website and you want to be number one on google? The question you need to ask first is, number one for what? Number one for "cars"? Unlikely you'll get that since there must be million, perhaps even billions, of sites out there that have to do with cars. Maybe your site is about super fast cars that are purple. Getting to number one on google for the search "super fast purple cars" would be a lot easier to do. The point is, choose keywords that truly describe your site, words that someone would definitely put into a search engine in order to find a page like yours. Make the words specific enough that your site won't be lost in the endless sea of other slightly related pages.

Now that you have chosen your keywords, it's time to put them onto your page in an artful way so that when the search engine bots crawl your site, they will decide that your content is useful and that your page should appear among the first search results. It used to be that this was a very simple process. Ten years ago, search engines weren't particularly sophisticated and tended to reason that the more a word appeared on a page, the more the page must have to do with that word. Consequently, many pages used to have nothing more than a list of keywords repeated over and over again in. Fortunately the search engines have learned since then and continue to learn, so they are always striving to put the most useful websites at the top of the search results.

What does this mean? It means you should make sure that if you want your page to have keyword x, then make sure it has useful information about x. Don't needlessly repeat your keywords on your website, because the search engines will realize that you are artificially placing them there. Even worse, people reading your site will be turned off and go somewhere else. (As an aside, the more people like your site, the more they will link to it, which will place you higher in search results.) You might think that you can fool a search engine bot, but be aware that search engines are always improving their methods of detecting useful websites and ranking them accordingly. Conversely, they are always improving their methods of finding useless sites. It's their job to return useful information to people who search for it, so don't think that you can have a highly ranked page that only has a few keywords and no real substance. It might work today, but in the future you'll find yourself at the bottom of the results.

The bottom line is that your keywords should naturally be part of whatever text you put on your site. Other than that, there are a few little things that you shouldn't ignore:

1) In the head tag at the top of your pages, don't forget to include your keywords (in a natural way) in the title tag.

Example:

<title>Super Fast Purple Cars</title>

There is also a meta-name-keywords tag that should contain your keywords, though you can throw them in this one more or less haphazardly as this won't be ready by humans. Just make sure to separate the words and phrases with commas.

Example:

2) When using img tags, make sure to include the title and alt attributes. This often gets overlooked, but can make a significant difference. The alt attribute is displayed if the viewer's browser is set to not show images, which rarely happens, but search engines still pay attention to it. Similarly, the title attribute will pop up when someone mouses over the image. In any case, both should be human-readable.

Example:

3) The text used in anchor tags should describe what the link is for. As far as possible, make sure the text of the anchor (that is, the text you actually click on to follow the link) contains the desired keywords *of the page being linked to* and not necessarily the keywords of the page on which the link is found.

Bad example:

Click <a href="fastpurplecars.html">here</a> to see some really fast purple cars!

Good example:

<a href="fastpurplecars.html">Some really fast purple cars!</a>

Hopefully you've found this little tutorial useful. Again, it only teaches the basics, but you'd be surprised at how many high profile sites don't follow them and how competitive your page can be in the search results if you implement these simple measures.

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<B><font size=+1>Keyword Density Tool</font></b> © <a href="http://www.seochat.com">SEO Chat™</a>

<form action="http://www.seochat.com/" method="GET" name="form"><input type=hidden name=go value=1><input tabindex=1 type="hidden" name="option" value="com_seotools"><input tabindex=2 type="hidden" name="tool" value="6"><p><b>URL</b><br>Valid URL<br><input type=text tabindex=3 name="url" size=32 value=""><p><b>Results</b><br>Number of keyterms to display<br><select tabindex=4 name="termno" id="termno" size=""><option value="100" >All Terms</option><option value="5" >5 Terms</option><option value="10" >10 Terms</option><option value="25" >25 Terms</option><option value="50" >50 Terms</option><option value="75" >75 Terms</option><option value="100" >100 Terms</option></select><p><b>Elements to include</b><br>Select from below<br><input tabindex=5 type="checkbox" name="include_meta" id="include_meta" value="1" checked="checked">Include Meta?<br><input tabindex=6 type="checkbox" name="include_alt" id="include_alt" value="1" checked="checked">Include Alts?<br><input tabindex=7 type="checkbox" name="include_title" id="include_title" value="1" checked="checked">Include Title?<br><p><b>Include numerals</b><br>E.g. '2004' would count as a keyword<br><input tabindex=8 type="radio" name="numerals" id="numerals" value="1" > Yes<br><input tabindex=9 type="radio" name="numerals" id="numerals" value="0" checked="checked"> No<br><p><b>No. words</b><br>Number of words per phrase<br><input tabindex=10 type="radio" name="words" id="words" value="3" checked="checked"> 3 words<br><input tabindex=11 type="radio" name="words" id="words" value="2" > 2 words<br><input tabindex=12 type="radio" name="words" id="words" value="1" > 1 word<br><p><b>Enter Captcha To Continue</b><br>To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below<br><input type=text tabindex=13 name="imageverify" size=32 value=""><input tabindex=14 type="hidden" name="timehsh" value="48436c574979513d"><p><img src=http://www.seochat.com/includes/showcaptcha.php?bd=48436c574979513d border=1><p><input tabindex=15 type=submit name="submit" id="submit" value="Analyze"><p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.developershed.com/esupport/"><font color="#0000FF"><b>Report Problem with Tool.</b></font></a></form>

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Here is some code from

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/