Focus on Keyword Density

In most cases, your largest website visitor is an engine bot.  In order to add your page, a search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, will send out "crawlers" or "bots" to harvest your pages. These bots cannot harvest things that are created/triggered by javascript, or 'see' images (though they do check alt tags) and don't play well with flash files if at all. While all these things may make the site look better, they do little to nothing in terms of SEO (search engine optimization).

There are two major parts to understanding keywords, one is the meta tag and the other is density. If you are starting a brand new site you will need to do a little planning for both SEO and content structure.

Keywords are the focus of your content. You should come up with a list of no more than 25 keywords that describe your sites message. Once you have your list of keywords keep them in focus as you write your content pages. Use these keywords through your site to improve SEO.

The meta keyword tag found in the head of most web documents has little effect for Google, Bing, and many of the other larger search engines. Yahoo still uses the meta tag as part of the algorithm, as well as some of the meta crawlers. Search engines all read the text in the tag, they just do not apply the information to the algorithms. We have always found that placing the keyword meta tag helps me write better keyword rich content. If your page has a keyword tag , you must make sure that word is on the same page in the content.

Density is the number of times a word is placed in the readable content of a page. If I have ten readable words and one word is a keyword I have a density of 10%. If I have 100 words and one of them is a keyword I now have a density of 1%. Keep your density between 3.5% and 7% look for an online density analyzer to get an estimated density of a keyword.

Make sure to use keywords in your titles or aliases, links, and content. DO NOT STUFF keywords. Content that does not make sense and is just full of keywords for the sole purpose to raise the keyword density to a high level will cause your site to be penalized in the search engines. It is very difficult to write an article that someone will enjoy reading or find useable with the density over 7%.