Keywords That Have Weight
Apr 27th, 2008 by admin
Even several years ago strategic positioning of keywords on the page and in the source code was the major factor for successful search engine optimization. This situation has changed: in current SEO, remote votes of confidence for the web pages mean more now. I would say that sixty percent of optimization happens off-page and forty percent takes place on the web page.
When I talk about on-page optimization, I naturally need to start with keyword density. Sometimes, it is called keywords weight instead. Keyword density is a measure of how often a keyword is found in a specific area of the Web page like a title, heading, anchor name, visible text, etc. against all other words. Since search engine spiders see web page as HTML code instead of what visitors view through a browser, you must have an understanding of the structure of a typical HTML document.
The title of the page that a webmaster adds between HTML tags <title></title> is considered to be one of the most prominent places on a web page. Title should not be longer than 8 words and should contain the most important keyword. It is also highly recommended to have keywords in the URL.
The recommended standard density for body text is 3-7% for each keyword you optimize on that page. Basically, this means that every keyword or key phrase should repeat 3-7 times for every 100 words. If keyword density goes over 10%, it looks suspicious to search engine spiders. Each web page should generally be optimized for no more than three keywords or phrases.
When the keyword is located in HTML headings, for example between <h1></h1> or <h2></h2> tags, it is considered important by the search engine spiders. Yet, putting keyword in the heading tags is not good enough, if the web page does not have actual text about this particular keyword.
Keywords that are located in the beginning of the web page text also matter, although not as much as keywords in the title or headings. The most important thing here is to understand that beginning of the page does not mean the visually viewed first paragraph of the text. So, check the source of the page in order to be on the safe side.
Spiders don’t read images; they just skip them with one exception. They can read text that describes the image in the ALT attribute of the <img> tag. If there are images on your page, fill in the ALT attributes with some keywords about images that you describe.
