Let’s first define our terms. SEM encompasses all of the various ways site owners can use search engines to attract more traffic to their websites. SEM is all about helping users of search engines find your website. SEM is comprised of two major parts: SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.
SEO techniques help a website reach its optimal rank in the “organic” (naturally relevant) section of search engine results pages (SERPs), which increases its visibility to searchers. SEO is fundamentally all about making a website more discoverable, accessible, and usable for visitors. If you consider the needs of your users during the design phase of your site, then you will automatically go a long way toward optimizing your site’s code, structure, and content for search engines.
One of the most basic users your site will host is the search engine web crawler or robot (often referred to as simply a “bot”). It primarily reads text-based content, just as the most basic web browsers do. When you consider and accommodate the lowest level of text browser in your site design, search bots will be able to crawl more of your site, which helps the search engines index more of your site, which then allows us to evaluate more of your site’s content relevance. And once a searcher uses keyword queries that match your site’s content, your site will then be included in those SERPs (assuming you have compelling content to offer). This is the essence of SEO.
PPC, on the other hand, is paid advertising on SERPs related to the keywords the searcher used, so the ads are (hopefully) just as relevant to the searcher as are the organic results. (Note that some ad distributors can place PPC ads in other, affiliated websites beyond SERPs.) Thus PPC also increases a site’s visibility.
However, there are big differences between these techniques. PPC is a temporary listing, only lasting for the duration of the ad campaign, and costs the sponsoring advertiser money each time a user clicks the ad (aka impression). Alternatively, changes made in organic rank achieved by SEO techniques are done in the permanent search result listings, which are provided at no cost to either the listed website owners or the searcher. (Of course, the ranking order of organic listings is constantly evolving due to many factors, such as new, relevant sites coming online, others going offline, tweaks to the algorithms search engines use for determining relevance, and when sites with great content implement SEO improvements).
Another difference between PPC and SEO is time for efficacy. As soon as a PPC ad campaign starts, searchers will see ad impressions. The benefits of SEO on organic search results, on the other hand, take time to see. While your SEO-driven changes are immediately seen as improvements by visitors to your site, search engines need to recrawl your site, reevaluate the changes, and reassess your site’s relevance and value in the SERPs. That takes time, so patience is a virtue when practicing SEO.
Meta keyword tag
The meta tag’s keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content.
When creating keyword text, remember the following:
When creating keyword text, remember the following:
- Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the title and meta description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure
- Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters
- Don’t repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the list
Meta description tag
While search engines reserve the right to use a variety of inputs for filling out site description snippets in their SERPs, webmasters who provide unique, concise, compelling, and keyword-laden descriptions in their meta tag’s description attribute help guide the development of their websites’ SERP captions.
When creating the description text, remember the following:
When creating the description text, remember the following:
- Create unique descriptions for each page, using keywords specific to that page
- Keep the description text between 25 and 150 characters in length
- Do not copy title tag text content as a description; this is a wasted opportunity to develop more keywords and adds no value
- Make the description text unique on every page
- Don’t use any of the following special characters in description text: '"<>{}[]()
Title tag
The key message with the title tag is still the same. The page title is a critical element for helping the search engine bot identify the contents of your page. The title is usually part of the standard blue link entry for a site in the search engine results pages (SERPs). If you omit this tag or leave the default tag content provided by a template in your development environment, such as New Page 1, folks who eventually find your site in the SERP will hardly be inclined to click your undefined link. And they may have trouble finding you anyway, because you will have missed a great opportunity to associate a few choice keywords and phrases with your page.
When creating the title text, keep the following in mind:
When creating the title text, keep the following in mind:
- The closer the word is to the start, the more heavily weighted it is as a keyword. This is true for the bot as well as the reader. (For information on the affect the Golden Triangle phenomenon of user scanning of a SERP, check out the new Bing white paper.)
- Keep the title text between 5 and 65 characters in length
- For greatest efficiency and consistency, write titles using this syntax: keyword phrase, category, website title (or brand)
- Make the title text unique on every page
- Don’t use any of the following special characters in title text: '"<>{}[]()
Don’t use script or images for site navigation
Bots can’t read script. They can’t execute it to see what happens. That’s why you need to be judicious in your use of script on your site. If the availability of important content is reliant on script execution, this is bad news in terms of getting the site effectively crawled by the bot. And if you’ve done the unthinkable and put all of your site navigation in sophisticated scripts, the bot won’t be able to follow any of those links to your other pages (which you’ve probably noticed by now). That means none of your site’s other pages will be crawled, and thus won’t make it into the index. And that’s a serious SEO problem if I’ve ever heard one!
Speaking of navigation, it’s also unwise, for the same reasons already mentioned earlier, to use image files for navigational menu items. The bot can’t read the text in the images. So these important page description elements, which are the most significant identifiers of the content on your site’s pages (they are prime spots to use your best keywords), are left as empty holes to the bot. What a wasted opportunity to score some keyword relevance to those pages! Don’t let this happen to you! Using major keywords for each page in those images’ alt attributes can help offset this some, but if you have a design choice before publishing the site, go with straight text here!
Speaking of navigation, it’s also unwise, for the same reasons already mentioned earlier, to use image files for navigational menu items. The bot can’t read the text in the images. So these important page description elements, which are the most significant identifiers of the content on your site’s pages (they are prime spots to use your best keywords), are left as empty holes to the bot. What a wasted opportunity to score some keyword relevance to those pages! Don’t let this happen to you! Using major keywords for each page in those images’ alt attributes can help offset this some, but if you have a design choice before publishing the site, go with straight text here!
Use descriptive file names for images
Always look for creative ways to legitimately inject keywords into your webpages. While textual content in image files can’t be read by the bot, the bot can see the content in the tags you use. The tag is a prime spot to inject a little keyword juice. Instead of naming your image files with a generic name like Art001.jpg, consider its contents and its intended use on the page to capture another keyword. If your site is for an Italian restaurant, wouldn’t an image file called lasagna-dinner.jpg be a more descriptive name? It would be for a bot.
And, of course, for every image file you embed in your pages, you need to add the alt attribute to the tag using keywords describing the image within the context of the page. Some other cool tips for using image tags include:
Limit the length of alt attribute value text to no more than 100-150 characters.
Unless the image is of a company or brand logo, keep brand names out of alt attribute text (or at least push the brand name to the end). It’s better to use clear, clean, and keyword-rich explanations of what the image is about.
Don’t begin alt attribute text with either the symbol "©" or the word "copyright". The use of either at the beginning of the alt attribute value text will incorrectly indicate to the bot that the image is highly related to a copyright. Use your page’s keywords instead.
Implement a lower case naming protocol in your code for images. XHTML requires that tags be written in lower case, so getting into the habit of using lower case in your tag code is a best practice.
And, of course, for every image file you embed in your pages, you need to add the alt attribute to the tag using keywords describing the image within the context of the page. Some other cool tips for using image tags include:
Limit the length of alt attribute value text to no more than 100-150 characters.
Unless the image is of a company or brand logo, keep brand names out of alt attribute text (or at least push the brand name to the end). It’s better to use clear, clean, and keyword-rich explanations of what the image is about.
Don’t begin alt attribute text with either the symbol "©" or the word "copyright". The use of either at the beginning of the alt attribute value text will incorrectly indicate to the bot that the image is highly related to a copyright. Use your page’s keywords instead.
Implement a lower case naming protocol in your code for images. XHTML requires that tags be written in lower case, so getting into the habit of using lower case in your tag code is a best practice.
Don’t put important text content into graphics
The search engine bot can’t see image file content as you and I can. To the bot, references to images are merely links to external, binary files in the HTML code, the contents of which can’t be indexed. Keep your page’s important content (the stuff you want indexed so it is discoverable by search engines) in text form within the webpage. Use images instead for illustrations, photos, designs, and other, non-text elements on the page.
This especially goes for key business information, such as your company name, business address, and other critical info you want indexed (and customers to find). How many times have we all seen sites that use logo images containing all of their company information? And the owners of those sites wonder why they don’t show up in local search results. Tsk, tsk.
The same recommendation goes for animations in the form of Flash and Silverlight. These are great technologies to use to present videos, instructional information, entertainment, and much more. But don’t bury your useful text content within animations. Use them as enhancements of, not replacements for, your on-page, text-based content.
This especially goes for key business information, such as your company name, business address, and other critical info you want indexed (and customers to find). How many times have we all seen sites that use logo images containing all of their company information? And the owners of those sites wonder why they don’t show up in local search results. Tsk, tsk.
The same recommendation goes for animations in the form of Flash and Silverlight. These are great technologies to use to present videos, instructional information, entertainment, and much more. But don’t bury your useful text content within animations. Use them as enhancements of, not replacements for, your on-page, text-based content.
Images and Flash and script
The use of interesting and relevant images and animations on a website can certainly elevate the user experience. But it is the wise webmaster who knows when and how to use these technologies to enhance both the user and the search indexing experience. A less than wise approach might cause a site to falter in the search engine results pages (SERPs), potentially all the way to the point of dropping out of sight.
Invalid mark-up code
If your page mark-up code is bad, you’re bound to have crawling problems. But you might not know that the problems exist if your testing merely consists of, “How does it look in my PC’s browser?” Modern desktop browsers are pretty adept at munging through what you probably meant to do into a workable, on-screen presentation. They can often deal with code that is footloose and fancy-free when it comes to standards compliance. But the search engine bots are not as flexible as desktop browsers, and code problems can often trip them up and bring the crawling of your site to a halt. In addition to that, mobile device browsers are not likely to be as accommodating with poorly written code as desktop browsers, either. Anything you can do to make your code solid and standards compliant is good, for both your users and the bots.
To see where your code stands, use a good mark-up code validator. Most good development environments will offer either a built-in validator or references to such tools online. A particularly detailed validator is the W3C Markup Validation Service, a free, online HTML validator from the folks who bring you the coding language standards. It doesn’t validate entire websites recursively, just one page at a time, but it is still a very good source for detecting and identifying the issues behind coding errors.
Technical recommendations for your website
Use the following techniques to ensure your website is technically optimized for MSNBot and other web crawlers:
- Use only well-formed, HTML code in your webpages. Make sure that all paired tags are closed, and that all links open the correct webpage. For information on validating your HTML code, see W3C Markup Validation Service or use a comparable tool.
- If your website contains broken links, MSNBot might not be able to index your website effectively, thus preventing people from reaching all of your webpages. For information on finding broken links on your website, see the Help topic for the Webmaster Center's Crawl Issues tool.
- If you move a webpage, set up the webpage's original URL to redirect people to the new webpage. Indicate whether the move is permanent or temporary. For more information, see What to do when your website is relocated.
- Make sure MSNBot is allowed to crawl your website and isn't on your list of web crawlers that are prohibited from indexing your website. For more information, see Control which webpages on your website are indexed.
- Use a Robots.txt file or tags to Control which webpages on your website are indexed by MSNBot (The Bing web crawler, a program that scans websites and indexes their content, such as text, documents, images, and links, for searching.) and other web crawlers. You can use the Robots.txt file to prevent web crawlers from crawling specific files and folders. For more information about the Robots.txt file and the Robots Exclusion standard, see Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). This site might be available in English only.
- Keep your URLs simple and static. URLs that are complicated or that change frequently are difficult to index as link destinations. For example, the URL www.example.com/mywebpage is easier for MSNBot to crawl and for people to type than a long URL with multiple extensions. Also, a URL that doesn't change is easy for people to remember and bookmark. That makes your webpage a more likely link destination from other websites.
- Watch for malicious software (malware). Links to webpages on your website that lead to malware on third-party websites or contain malicious content, such as a maliciously corrupted image or document file, or a harmful ActiveX control or JavaScript, will be disabled and highlighted as Malware in Bing results webpages. See the Help topics for the Webmaster Center's Crawl Issues tool and Outbound Links tool to learn how to find these detected malware issues on your website. See Remediate detected malware to help rid your website of all malware.
Link Neighborhoods matter!
Search engines do recognize “bad neighborhoods” on the Web. These are places (such as dedicated domains or even IP ranges) that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges. Bad neighborhood sites often “sell” you, the webmaster, the opportunity to have them link dozens, hundreds, sometimes even more, of their sites to yours, all based on the assertion that this will boost your page rank in search. However, those referrer sites are usually nothing more than junk pages, consisting of endless lists of outbound links to any subject under the sun, void of any meaningful content. To make matters worse, many of the customers of such services tend to be shady enterprises, such as those associated with adult entertainment, counterfeit goods, gambling, fake pharmaceuticals, and pirated software. That’s bad from the perspective of search engines.
Search engines can identify these link exchange sites for what they are – fraudulent attempts to elevate the ranking status of sites they link to. Actively associating with these bad neighborhood characters, who are notoriously untrustworthy resources, reflects badly upon your site. These are the folks who, once discovered for who they are, are typically penalized or even banned from search engine indexes. I said they were bad!
Luckily, search engines can also identify worthy sites as well, and as a result, they can distinguish between endorsements by thugs versus trusted friends. These trusted sites are identified by features such as:
The quality and quantity of their inbound and outbound links (especially those built over time to other, similarly respected sites)
The quality and quantity of their original content, as well as its consistency over time
The relative content refresh rate and the age of the site (older sites are considered more reliable because they have a history of consistent performance over time)
Search engines deem the best of these as authority sites, and the valued reputation they earn over time is reflected outward with their outbound links. You need good inbound links to set your site apart as a trusted, authority site. And by linking to other, relevant authority sites, you are sharing that goodness with others. It’s a virtuous circle. Again, when sites provide value to the customer, it’s good.
Search engines can identify these link exchange sites for what they are – fraudulent attempts to elevate the ranking status of sites they link to. Actively associating with these bad neighborhood characters, who are notoriously untrustworthy resources, reflects badly upon your site. These are the folks who, once discovered for who they are, are typically penalized or even banned from search engine indexes. I said they were bad!
Luckily, search engines can also identify worthy sites as well, and as a result, they can distinguish between endorsements by thugs versus trusted friends. These trusted sites are identified by features such as:
The quality and quantity of their inbound and outbound links (especially those built over time to other, similarly respected sites)
The quality and quantity of their original content, as well as its consistency over time
The relative content refresh rate and the age of the site (older sites are considered more reliable because they have a history of consistent performance over time)
Search engines deem the best of these as authority sites, and the valued reputation they earn over time is reflected outward with their outbound links. You need good inbound links to set your site apart as a trusted, authority site. And by linking to other, relevant authority sites, you are sharing that goodness with others. It’s a virtuous circle. Again, when sites provide value to the customer, it’s good.
Quality of Links vs Quantity
This is a leading misconception among many webmasters. They naturally assume that if one inbound link is good, ten are great, and 47,500 must be fantastic! All things being equal, that might be true, but it is very rare that all things are indeed equal. Just go and try to find 47,500 high quality sites that are relevant to yours. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Instead of making the mistake of focusing on quantity, you’ll be far more successful if you focus instead on quality. A small number of highly relevant, inbound links from sites with solid reputations can do more for you than a ton of junk links. Attempting to boost the quantity of inbound links by artificial means, such as link exchanges, is old-school thinking. That’s bad.
Relevance is the word today, and that helps distinguish the quality of links. If you run a local restaurant and you get an inbound link from a site that sells Internet marketing services, do you really believe that will influence potential customers to dine at your restaurant? Probably not. But what if you got a link from a well-respected foodie blog or restaurant review columnist? Now that will likely make a lot of folks sit up and take notice. That’s really good! Search engines understand this and take this into account in their rankings.
Instead of making the mistake of focusing on quantity, you’ll be far more successful if you focus instead on quality. A small number of highly relevant, inbound links from sites with solid reputations can do more for you than a ton of junk links. Attempting to boost the quantity of inbound links by artificial means, such as link exchanges, is old-school thinking. That’s bad.
Relevance is the word today, and that helps distinguish the quality of links. If you run a local restaurant and you get an inbound link from a site that sells Internet marketing services, do you really believe that will influence potential customers to dine at your restaurant? Probably not. But what if you got a link from a well-respected foodie blog or restaurant review columnist? Now that will likely make a lot of folks sit up and take notice. That’s really good! Search engines understand this and take this into account in their rankings.
Link Relevance is Important
Frankly, when seeking an endorsement with an external, inbound link, the theme of the site you want to link to yours should be relevant to your site’s theme (or at least relevant to the theme of the page you want linked to). Same goes for those external sites you link to. Relevance is key to lending credibility to both your site and the other site, regardless whether it is an outbound or inbound link.
Instead of you thinking like a webmaster who’s trying hard to manipulate your search engine rank, just for a moment, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Will they really benefit from clicking on that outbound link? Will they learn something new that is relevant to the current page they are on? To illustrate this point, let’s say your site is all about women’s fashion and you have a page on how to select the right handbag. Linking to relevant pages on sites like Chanel or Jimmy Choo would be a useful strategy. The key point is to enhance the customer experience that starts with a search query, includes finding your site, and then going from there. If your site facilitates that process, that’s good!
Here’s another angle: let’s say a back-alley thug walks up to you in the parking lot of a funeral home and says, in a menacing way, that he knows of a great restaurant that you needed to try. That endorsement seems wildly out of place because of the context. And would you be inclined to respect his recommendation? Probably not (especially after he’s gone!). So this is bad.
Instead of you thinking like a webmaster who’s trying hard to manipulate your search engine rank, just for a moment, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Will they really benefit from clicking on that outbound link? Will they learn something new that is relevant to the current page they are on? To illustrate this point, let’s say your site is all about women’s fashion and you have a page on how to select the right handbag. Linking to relevant pages on sites like Chanel or Jimmy Choo would be a useful strategy. The key point is to enhance the customer experience that starts with a search query, includes finding your site, and then going from there. If your site facilitates that process, that’s good!
Here’s another angle: let’s say a back-alley thug walks up to you in the parking lot of a funeral home and says, in a menacing way, that he knows of a great restaurant that you needed to try. That endorsement seems wildly out of place because of the context. And would you be inclined to respect his recommendation? Probably not (especially after he’s gone!). So this is bad.
Links - SEO commodity
Links are an oft-misunderstood commodity in the world of SEO. Do they matter? Sure, if you want to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs). The rank of two sites on the same topic offering equally good, original content will be differentiated in the SERPs by the inbound links they get externally, and to a lesser extent, the outbound links they make to external sites.
Just to be clear, we’re talking about external inbound and outbound links to pages on other websites, not intra-site, mailto, or scripting links. Let’s take a look at what makes some links good or bad.
Just to be clear, we’re talking about external inbound and outbound links to pages on other websites, not intra-site, mailto, or scripting links. Let’s take a look at what makes some links good or bad.
The robots.txt file
The robots.txt file is commonly used to block bots (identified as user-agents within the context of the file) from accessing directories and files that contain data the webmaster doesn’t want added to the search index, such as scripts, databases, and other information that is not intended for public consumption or has no value for searchers. For example, a basic robots.txt file might include directives such as the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
The above sample robots.txt file code applies to all user-agents (bots to you and me) and blocks bot access to all files in the directory named /private on the web server.
But you can do more than that with the robots.txt file. What if you actually had a ton of existing files in /private but actually wanted some of them made available for the crawler to see? Instead of re-architecting your site to move certain content to a new directory (and potentially breaking internal links along the way), use the Allow directive. Allow is a non-standard REP directive, but it’s supported by Bing and other major search engines. Note that to be compatible with the largest number of search engines, you should list all Allow directives before the generic Disallow directives for the same directory. Such a pair of directives might look like this:
Allow: /private/public.doc
Disallow: /private/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
The above sample robots.txt file code applies to all user-agents (bots to you and me) and blocks bot access to all files in the directory named /private on the web server.
But you can do more than that with the robots.txt file. What if you actually had a ton of existing files in /private but actually wanted some of them made available for the crawler to see? Instead of re-architecting your site to move certain content to a new directory (and potentially breaking internal links along the way), use the Allow directive. Allow is a non-standard REP directive, but it’s supported by Bing and other major search engines. Note that to be compatible with the largest number of search engines, you should list all Allow directives before the generic Disallow directives for the same directory. Such a pair of directives might look like this:
Allow: /private/public.doc
Disallow: /private/
File Format
The robots.txt file must be saved in a standard text file format, such as ASCII or UTF-8, so it can be read by the bots. One easy way to verify that the proper file format is used is to edit the file in Microsoft Notepad. Save the file using the Notepad default file format type, Text Documents (*.txt) with ANSI encoding.
SiteMaps
Have you ever noticed how pirate treasure maps are like Sitemaps? While your website may not contain a treasure of gold and silver (unless it’s a metals commodities trading site!), if you have good content, that is certainly treasure to someone who is looking for it. Unfortunately, it’s buried on your website and no one knows what’s there except you! But since you want to share your site’s treasure with others, you need to let them know what you have buried and where to find it. You can wait for search engine crawlers (aka bots) and random traffic to come by to browse, but that will take time and even then, they might not discover everything that you have to offer. Instead, you can help the search bots to dig up your treasured content with a Sitemap.
Now I should pause for a moment to mention that you shouldn’t confuse sitemaps with Sitemaps. You’ve got that, right? Well, just in case that’s as clear as mud, keep this in mind: when referring to sitemap files in text (such as this!), use the lower case word “sitemap” to mean HTML-based files intended for users to browse. They typically contain a list of all the pages on your site.
On the other hand, use the capitalized word “Sitemap” to mean XML-based files designed for use by search engine bots to collect data from webmasters identifying the most important pages and directories within their sites for crawling and indexing. Both types of sitemap files can (and probably should) use all lower case letters in their file name (such as sitemap.xml and sitemap.htm), but capitalize the references to the XML-based one in text to help readers distinguish which type of sitemap you are discussing. This article, coming from the perspective of a search engine, is focusing on Sitemaps, not sitemaps. You’re with me now, right? :-)
A good Sitemap will tell search engine bots about the content stored on a site. That helps the content be seen by the bot and, with any luck (assuming the content is well formed and has value), get into the index. Users who are on a content treasure quest will query search engines with keywords to locate the content they are seeking. If the search engine indexed the content found by the bot, which can be more likely when a good Sitemap is present, then that site’s content has a better chance for appearing in the search engine results pages (SERP). After all, you can’t get onto the SERP if your pages aren’t indexed
Now I should pause for a moment to mention that you shouldn’t confuse sitemaps with Sitemaps. You’ve got that, right? Well, just in case that’s as clear as mud, keep this in mind: when referring to sitemap files in text (such as this!), use the lower case word “sitemap” to mean HTML-based files intended for users to browse. They typically contain a list of all the pages on your site.
On the other hand, use the capitalized word “Sitemap” to mean XML-based files designed for use by search engine bots to collect data from webmasters identifying the most important pages and directories within their sites for crawling and indexing. Both types of sitemap files can (and probably should) use all lower case letters in their file name (such as sitemap.xml and sitemap.htm), but capitalize the references to the XML-based one in text to help readers distinguish which type of sitemap you are discussing. This article, coming from the perspective of a search engine, is focusing on Sitemaps, not sitemaps. You’re with me now, right? :-)
A good Sitemap will tell search engine bots about the content stored on a site. That helps the content be seen by the bot and, with any luck (assuming the content is well formed and has value), get into the index. Users who are on a content treasure quest will query search engines with keywords to locate the content they are seeking. If the search engine indexed the content found by the bot, which can be more likely when a good Sitemap is present, then that site’s content has a better chance for appearing in the search engine results pages (SERP). After all, you can’t get onto the SERP if your pages aren’t indexed
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Way back in the day when search engine technologies were just emerging, this might have been considered a viable, albeit simplistic, strategy. Today, however, such techniques are detected for what they are – attempts to fraudulently load up pages with keywords in an effort to artificially gain higher ranking in the SERPs. Just as black pepper soup would be unpalatable to a diner, so is keyword stuffing to a modern search engine. When the search engine index algorithms detect the use of these techniques, they will typically impose penalties on those sites to artificially lower their organic rank status in the SERPs or, if the fraudulent effort is egregious enough, purge the site from the search engine index altogether.
Keyword placement priority
Search engines look for keywords and key phrases to be in spots where writers use them to emphasize key points. Put another way, words used in certain places automatically carry a higher prioritized value. For example, words used in page titles are considered definitive for assessing the contents of that page. So because the title defines the page content, those words carry more weight than do words found in body text. In fact, body text is the least definitive use of keywords, because it is the most common text. Words that describe the body text as a whole or even other pages as a whole naturally carry the weight of those entire pages. Writers of technical books know the power of words that define entire passages (such as page titles, chapter, and section headings), and that assumption is used by search engine bots as well.
So in a nutshell, written in the form of naturally spoken language, use your keywords in the following areas for the greatest impact:
So in a nutshell, written in the form of naturally spoken language, use your keywords in the following areas for the greatest impact:
- Page title (inside the title tags)
- Body text headers
- Links to other pages (the link text between the tags)
- Meta tags (specifically when used with the name="description" and the name="keyword" parameters)
Select Good Keywords
When search engine web crawlers (aka robots, or more simply, bots) index your site’s content, the words you use help the search engine identify the theme of your site on a per-page basis. But not all words are equal. There are ways to prioritize the importance of some words over others. And by knowing what a search engine does to identify that priority, you can “speak” to it so that the search engine reflects your priorities as its own.
First and foremost, keep in mind that the bot crawls your site in an effort to help classify its content from an end user perspective. After all, our efforts are aimed toward helping end users get highly relevant and comprehensive search results. If the content on your home page is written in an awkward, choppy, keyword-stuffed manner that would not read well for a human visitor, the bot will pick up on that and your efforts will not achieve what you intend. It’s like the difference between a beginner cook and a master chef. Your keywords are the spices of your content, not your main ingredient. A good beef barley soup has black pepper in it, but no one wants to eat black pepper soup!
So the goal for you, the webmaster, is to flavor the natural content you have in your site with the keywords and key phrases you developed earlier. Keep your site’s content readable, ensuring the use of language on the page sounds natural, and use the keywords and phrases when it makes sense naturally. That said, if rewriting some passages of text so that you can use more of your keywords in a natural sounding form in strategic areas of your pages is doable, then it is usually worthwhile to do so.
First and foremost, keep in mind that the bot crawls your site in an effort to help classify its content from an end user perspective. After all, our efforts are aimed toward helping end users get highly relevant and comprehensive search results. If the content on your home page is written in an awkward, choppy, keyword-stuffed manner that would not read well for a human visitor, the bot will pick up on that and your efforts will not achieve what you intend. It’s like the difference between a beginner cook and a master chef. Your keywords are the spices of your content, not your main ingredient. A good beef barley soup has black pepper in it, but no one wants to eat black pepper soup!
So the goal for you, the webmaster, is to flavor the natural content you have in your site with the keywords and key phrases you developed earlier. Keep your site’s content readable, ensuring the use of language on the page sounds natural, and use the keywords and phrases when it makes sense naturally. That said, if rewriting some passages of text so that you can use more of your keywords in a natural sounding form in strategic areas of your pages is doable, then it is usually worthwhile to do so.
Original Content
Content may be king, but as in modern monarchies, the king may not be the sole authority. Parliaments now rule, and they are made up of many constituent parts of society. And while the quality of your site’s content can have a leading role in helping you optimize your site’s organic ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s a multitude of constituent parts of your webpages that constitute the whole process of search engine optimization (SEO). But in this post, we’re talking about the king. King Content.
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