Very briefly, here are some guidelines:
Make the page about some specific topic that provides useful information to
the reader. Use keywords that best describe the page. Use these
words once or twice in each of the title and description. If two words
form a meaningful pair then use them together in the appropriate order. Put the
words once each in the keyword meta in descending order of importance. This is
my guess as to how search engines deal with this.
It the page has multiple topics then use more keywords. Use fewer keywords
on a tightly focussed page.
Use the keywords in the body text more frequently than other words.
Don't go overboard and 'spam' the page by putting the word far too many times.
If the page is large keep the percentage of each word below 5%. For
smaller pages, with fewer total words, the optimum percentage may be higher e.g.
up to 33% for a page with only three visible words. Don't deviate from
normal writing - you may be marked down.
Keep the percentages of other, less relevant, words well below that of the
most relevant words. e.g. 4.5%, 4.5%, 4.5%, 2.2%, 3.1%, 2.9% etc. This
example gives the page focus on three specific words, and thus a better match to
the relevant keyword combination.
Within the body text, use <h1> and <h2> headings appropriately and include
the keywords in these tag brackets.
Be careful not to spam the alt tags of insignificant images, such as spacers,
lines, single pixel dots etc. Put alt text on large images explaining what
is in the image so as to help people who have images turned off. If you
have some very tiny images that are important in some way and need alt text for
functional reasons then make them clickable buttons so that the search engine
does not interpret these as spam. When using functions like title,
synonyms and abbreviations do it in a manner which helps the reader - not for
spamming purposes.
It is helpful if the incoming links to the page have anchor text which is
relevant to the content of your page and this means including the keywords in
such anchor text. You do better with natural links from sites where
the webmaster feels that your content helps his visitors with supplementary
information that his visitors are seeking.
Note that when the search engine first finds a page, the content will be
significant to it so the text in the page matters. With time however, the search engine will be able to rely more on what other people think of your page, rather than any clever text counts you have
used.
As with all guidelines you are welcome to try something different - all
above is just my guesswork.
Finally, remember what I wrote at the top: It is
visitor satisfaction that is the key to success in getting your page visited.
It is hopeless having a page that seems highly relevant to a particular subject
if the visitor then finds this is not the case. Don't waste your time adjusting
text counts if the meaningful content itself is poor and could do with improvement.
All content Copyright Reserved (c) Satellite Signals Ltd 2004.
You can email me at:
Eric Johnston
Page started 12 June 2004, amended 8 June 2008
