In part 2 we talked about some of the key factors that are common to most search engines to get your website listed at the top of search results. In this part we are going to drill down and look at keywords in particular and the important role that they play in SEO.Search engines need to be able to quickly identify what a website is about and then to be able to access that information before they return results to a query. Looking at it from the Search engines point of view, when you type a phrase like “Networking websites” in Google, there are probably million of websites which use one or both of those words. Sometimes they might be: used together, separately or even in a different order. So you can imagine the trouble and time it would take if search engines had to search all the million of websites to see if any of the words matched and then to order them and then finally to display them back to you in the results section.
But as I’m sure you know, search engines return results really fast, that’s because they don’t st
So what search engines need to be able to do is to classify and rank websites in some kind of way. That’s why search engines Index websites. So instead of storing all the data about a website, they just store the key information as a formula and a link to the websites.
And that’s where keywords come in. There are two types of keywords, the ones that are visible to the user in the Content and the other which are meant just for the search engines, they are Metatags and Title.
Behind the scenes
Metatags
Metatags are the first stop for search engines to learn about what a website is about. Metatags are behind the scenes, meaning that they are encoded into the HTML but not seen by the user unless the user looks at the source code for a website page. The two main Metatags that you should be aware of are : “keywords” and “description”. And they look like this:
meta name=”keywords” content=”swindon, business, networking, events”
meta name=”description” content=”Swindon’s social networking group for businesses”
Make the tags meaningful to your site and try to pick words that you intend use in the content of your site. Also think about what you expect the Search engine user to type in to find your site.
Title
The title tag is one of the most important tags you have, simply because search engines tend to look at these very closely. Usually you would put the same text in here as you would for the main heading of the page in the content. It is quite normal to expect a different title tag for each web page, but less common to expect different Metatags for each web page.
Content
Density
One of the way that search engines try to find out about what a site is about is by taking notice of which words are used more often than others. You need to identify what words you want to closely associate with your site and then try to use them at about 7-8% word density. There are a couple of good tools on the internet to help you to do this, like:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/
Highlighted keywords
Search engines look more carefully at the words that are formatted (HTML). For example, Words that are used in:
- Heading tags
- Bold tags
- Link tags
Domain names
It can also be useful to use your keywords in your domain name too. If you do then the best way for them to be noticed by search engines is to separate them by dashes. For example: www.business-networking.com
is better than: www.businessnetworking.com or www.business_networking.com.
URLs
Well formatted URLs also can help:www.business-networking.com/swindon-events.html
is better than:www.business-networking.com/swindonevents.html
Thats all for now!
In the next part of SEO secrets we will talk about some of the great tools out there to help you rank your website better in the search engines. In particular we will look at how to compete against the older and more established sites.