Search Engine Optimization - Keyword Strategy
Keywords can be used effectively in your website provided you stay using good keyword practices. The average website can be effectively optimized for three to five good keyword phrases. We generally suggest 1 or 2 more popular competitive keyword phrases, 1 to 2 less competitive, but popular phases and perhaps one more obscure keyword phrase that's a diamond in the rough so to speak.
Keyword Strategy
Keywords in <title> tag
This is one of the most important places to have a keyword because what
is written inside the <title> tag shows in search results as your page
title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words at most) and the the
keyword must be near the beginning.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +3
Keywords in URL
Keywords in URL's help a lot - e.g. -
http://www.tampaflcontractor.com where “Tampa FL Contractor”
is the keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. But if you don't
have the keywords in other parts of the document, don't rely on having
them in the URL.
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Keyword density in document text
Another very important factor you need to check. 3-7 %
for major keywords is best, 1-2 for minor. Keyword density of over 10%
is suspicious and looks more like keyword stuffing, than a naturally
written text.
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Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)
One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware
that your page has actual text about the particular keyword.
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Keywords in the beginning of a document
Also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings. However, have in mind that the beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first paragraph – for instance if you use tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the second half of the table.
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Keywords in <alt> tags
Spiders don't read images but they do read their textual
descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you have images on your page, fill
in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +2
Keywords in metatags
Less and less important, especially for Google. Yahoo!
and Bing still rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Yahoo! or
Bing, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly
will not hurt, so do it.
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Keyword proximity
Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are. It is best if they are immediately one after the other (e.g. “dog food”), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have “dog” in the first paragraph and “food” in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase “dog food” without any other words in between. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.
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Keyword phrases
In addition to keywords, you can optimize for keyword
phrases that consist of several words – e.g. “SEO services”. It is best
when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular ones, so you can
get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes it makes
sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate keywords (“SEO” and “services”)
than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match.
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Secondary keywords
Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a golden mine
because when everybody else is optimizing for the most popular keywords,
there will be less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that
are optimized for the minor words. For instance, “real estate new
jersey” might have thousand times less hits than “real estate” only but
if you are operating in New Jersey, you will get less but considerably
better targeted traffic.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +1
Keyword stemming
For English this is not so much of a factor because
words that stem from the same root (e.g. dog, dogs, doggy, etc.) are
considered related and if you have “dog” on your page, you will get hits
for “dogs” and “doggy” as well, but for other languages keywords
stemming could be an issue because different words that stem from the
same root are considered as not related and you might need to optimize
for all of them.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +1
Keyword Mistypes
Spelling errors are very frequent and if you know that
your target keywords have popular misspellings or alternative spellings
(i.e. Christmas and Xmas), you might be tempted to optimize for them.
Yes, this might get you some more traffic but having spelling mistakes
on your site does not make a good impression, so you'd better don't do
it, or do it only in the metatags.
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Keyword dilution
When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of
keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of
all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the
text.
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Keyword stuffing
Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.
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