Target the right keywords

For those of you who are new to search engine marketing, a keyword is simply a word or phrase that people would search on to find your web site. You might think that choosing the right keywords to target would be a no brainier. However, you’d be surprised at how many people jump in, optimize their web site, and achieve top rankings. They then cry out in dismay when their hit registers no more visitors than it did before they want to all the work to tune up their site.

What happened? They failed to choose keyword that people were actually looking for. Therefore, I recommend you:
 

• Brainstorm a list of keywords and phrases that apply to your web site’s products and services. Try to place yourself in the shoes of the web searcher. Avoid generalities like “small business”. Yes, you may sell a product for small business, but who is going to search for “small business” when they are looking for a new windows accounting program?
   
• Take advantage of excellent services like word tracker  to tell  you which keyword are popular but not so competitive as to make a top ranking next to impossible. There’ a fine line between targeting keyword that are too general or competitive versus keyword  phrases that are so specific that few people ever think to search for them .word tracker handles both with ease. In addition, word tracker will do much of the brainstorming for you by taking a couple of keyword and producing a broad list of related words and phrases from which to choose.         

Again. Please don’t make the mistake of picking wrong keyword. Nothing is more disappointing that taking the time to achieve top ranking and then seeing   no increase in traffic form all your efforts.   Also, don’t pick keywords that are too popular or broad like” games “or “Entertainment.”  You’ll not only get visitors that are likely to buy product, but you amount of work needed to again that ranking will not be worth the trouble.  You’ll then join the ranks of misinformed critics screaming” search engine” optimization doesn’t work –don’t waste your time “search engine optimization works and works well, if you take time to do it right.

Link Farms

One unsuccessful method of increasing link popularity is by becoming part of a “Link Farm.” Link Farms are networks of sites that have all agreed to link to one another. Each of the sites in the link farm has a page containing links to all other sites that are part of the farm. One of the problems with this strategy is that the content of the sites that are linked together does not necessarily share any common theme. Therefore, even though your site may have a seemingly high link popularity score, most of the links carry very little weight since they lack relevancy to your site. Some link farms have tried to improve on this by categorizing their members and only establishing links between members that have related content.

While this is an improvement, it still does not address the core issue – a link farm is an artificial method of improving link popularity, and most search engine have mechanisms in place to either ignore or actually penalize link farm participants.

A couple of years ago, I attended a search engine strategies conference and someone in the audience asked about link farms. AltaVista’s chief scientist was sitting on the panel of experts and he laughed when he heard the question. He then proceeded to identify several well-known link farms by name and stated that AltaVista did not consider links from sites in those networks to have any validity whatsoever. If a link farm is promoting itself on the web chances are that search engines are already aware of it and will ignore any links form sites that are part of that network.

Keyword Density and SEO

Keyword page density is a measure of the relative frequency of the word in the text expressed as a percentage. For example, if a specific word is used 5 times on a page containing 100 words, the keyword density is 5%. If the density of a keyword is too low, the search engine will not pay much attention to it. If the density is too high, the search engine may activate its spam filter. If this happens, the page will be penalized and its position in search listings will be deliberately lowered.

The optimum value for keyword density is 5-7%. In the case of keyword phrases, you should calculate the total density of each of the individual keywords comprising the phrases to make sure it is within the specified limits. In practice, a keyword density of more than 7-8% does not seem to have any negative seo consequences. However, it is not necessary and can reduce the legibility of the content from a user’s viewpoint. 

Location of keywords on a page

A very short rule for SEO experts – the closer a keyword or keyword phrase is to the beginning of a document, the more significant it becomes for the search engine. 

Text format and SEO

Search engines pay special attention to page text that is highlighted or given special formatting. We recommend:

- use keywords in headings. Headings are text highlighted with the «H» HTML tags. The «h1» and «h2» tags are most effective. Currently, the use of CSS allows you to redefine the appearance of text highlighted with these tags. This means that «H» tags are used less than nowadays, but are still very important in seo work.;

- Highlight keywords with bold fonts. Do not highlight the entire text! Just highlight each keyword two or three times on the page. Use the «strong» tag for highlighting instead of the more traditional «B» bold tag.

Common search engine principles

To understand seo you need to be aware of the architecture of search engines. They all contain the following main components:

Spider - a browser-like program that downloads web pages.

Crawler – a program that automatically follows all of the links on each web page.

Indexer - a program that analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider and the crawler. 

Database– storage for downloaded and processed pages.

Results engine – extracts search results from the database. 

Web server – a server that is responsible for interaction between the user and other search engine components. 

Specific implementations of search mechanisms may differ. For example, the Spider+Crawler+Indexer component group might be implemented as a single program that downloads web pages, analyzes them and then uses their links to find new resources. However, the components listed are inherent to all search engines and the seo principles are the same. 

Spider. This program downloads web pages just like a web browser. The difference is that a browser displays the information presented on each page (text, graphics, etc.) while a spider does not have any visual components and works directly with the underlying HTML code of the page. You may already know that there is an option in standard web browsers to view source HTML code. 

Crawler. This program finds all links on each page. Its task is to determine where the spider should go either by evaluating the links or according to a predefined list of addresses. The crawler follows these links and tries to find documents not already known to the search engine. 

Indexer. This component parses each page and analyzes the various elements, such as text, headers, structural or stylistic features, special HTML tags, etc.

Database. This is the storage area for the data that the search engine downloads and analyzes. Sometimes it is called the index of the search engine.

Results Engine. The results engine ranks pages. It determines which pages best match a user's query and in what order the pages should be listed. This is done according to the ranking algorithms of the search engine. It follows that page rank is a valuable and interesting property and any seo specialist is most interested in it when trying to improve his site search results. In this article, we will discuss the seo factors that influence page rank in some detail. 

Web server. The search engine web server usually contains a HTML page with an input field where the user can specify the search query he or she is interested in. The web server is also responsible for displaying search results to the user in the form of an HTML page.