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Your keywords

The indexes do not return hits at random, however it may seem at times. They compare the indexed contents of a page with the search terms entered by the user: the better the match, the higher the position. The web page designer can affect this position by careful design. Keywords- the words you hope will match the terms used by the searcher- may appear anywhere on the page, but their position on the page will affect the score applied by the search engine when ranking the results in order of relevance.

Keyword Selection

Choose relevant keywords carefully and use them consistently- this should not just be your brand or organization’s name, but the word- any word- a visitor might enter when searching for your activity, product or service.

Identifying keywords can be as much art as science- you need to place yourself in the position of someone undertaking a web search for which you wish to be the result. Then identify- or guess- the terms they might use in their search. Those are your primary keywords. Lateral thinking may help- more practically, you should perform a search yourself, then analyse the pages returned as relevant hits. Keywords can be placed in several places on the page- identifying where they are placed will enable you to build up a set of words and phrases that you can then use in your own pages

Once you have selected keywords, carry out an Alta Vista search on each keyword in turn. See how many instances are records, and how the top two or three sites have designed their pages to reach the top of the listing. Where have they placed their keywords, and how often on the page do they occur? Use their success as a benchmark for your own page design and promotion.

Avoid the use of single character terms, terms with foreign accents, and words such as web, internet, email, or home which appear in 90% of all web sites. They will either simply not be matched or else they will be ignored by the index.

Key Placement

To appear higher in the listings requires a higher ‘score’ and this results form the keyword appearing more often and more relevantly in the page. Most indexes give higher relevance scores for the following: first paragraph, heading, title, URL, frequency, ALT, comments, META.

First Paragraph

Ensure your keywords appear in the first paragraph of text. Some indexers only include the first 50 or 100 words, some simply give a higher score if the word appears in the first paragraph.

Heading

Keywords placed within <H1> tags are assumed to be important. HTML was designed as a means of describing the structure of documents, not their layout and design. The heading tag therefore confirms the importance of a term.

<TITLE>

Words and phrases placed within the <TITLE> tag will appear in the blue line at the top of the screen, and will be returned in the set of search results as the title of the page. Indexers also generally attach a higher score to keywords placed here, and particularly to the first word or two in longer titles.60 characters is generally an acceptable maximum length. The title should be written using your best copyrighting skills- it has to stand out from at least nine other titles on a results list, so should look relevant and interesting, not merely descriptive.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

Keywords also typically receive a higher score if they are in the URL of the page. This is often not possible to change, but if you are planning a site and have the option between naming a file database.html or 3653-45a.html, choose the former.

Frequency

In simple terms, the more often a keyword appears in the page, the higher the score. However you could quickly make your page look ridiculous by the unnecessary mentions of particular words, no matter how relevant. Frequency is not just a question of large numbers. It is also a proportional measure. A shorter page with a few mentions of the keyword will do better than a very long page, even if it has a few more mentions, as the indexer will calculate the percentage of the words on the page that are relevant to the search. More than a certain level, perhaps as low as 3-4% of the content will be interpreted as "keyword spamming", the deliberate repetition of keywords, and penalized by removing the page form the index.

 

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