S.E.O. FACTORS

Keyword Density and Search Engine Optimization

Author - Tim Weber, GoWebLive.com

If you looked into Cleveland search engine optimization (SEO) in the last couple of years, you probably got a bunch of information about keywords. You learned a lot of ways, some of them a bit tricky, for maximizing the keywords on your website so as to improve your ranking on the search engine results pages. Keywords have been around for a while now as little tools for making the content of your page look attractive to the software, called spiders or web crawlers, that major search engines use to find relevant sites to match user’s search terms.

Ways to Use Keywords

There are several ways that sites use keywords to get a boost in the rankings, and not all of them are legitimate anymore. Here are the basics:

Content

- You cram as many keywords into your content on each page as possible. This usually meant up to fifteen or twenty keywords per page, and that is a lot of keywords. When a user read the page, they were inundated with words that matched what they were looking for. Unfortunately, the content itself was seldom as useful as it could be since it was more focused on keyword density than on helpful information.

META tags and alt tags

- These are the keyword placement opportunities found in the HTML code of each page on your site. The search engine spiders would crawl through this code and look for matching terms. So even if you didn’t talk about a particular topic on one page, your META tags could claim you did and draw visitors. Alt tags are the same thing but for images.

Page titles and descriptions

- If you could get the right combination of keywords in your page titles and the brief descriptions embedded in your source code, you could get the attention of search engine spiders. So Cleveland search engine optimization teams were suggesting some pretty keyword dense titles and descriptions that were not necessarily accurate or useful to the visitor.

Keyword Evolution

Today, these are still valid placements for keywords. You can use them in your content, place them in your page titles and descriptions, and embed them in your HTML code in the form of META tags and alt tags. The difference in the most recent search engine software changes and the spiders of old is the type of keyword use they are looking for. More is not always better today. In fact, a bunch of keywords crammed onto a page of useless content will not boost your ranking, rather it might lower it.

Instead, search engine spiders are looking for keywords that occur naturally in the text of a website. For search engine optimization, Cleveland businesses are going back to the natural way of presenting information on the web. Articles with useful information, META tags and alt tags that accurately describe what’s on the page, and titles and descriptions that direct a user easily to the information they need. These are the SEO methods that work now with major search engines like Google.

So when you’re thinking about SEO, natural is the keyword of the moment.