Copyright Divine rankmaniac 2012 Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 18 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 18 How many times should I use a keyword You dont want to fill every page up with every keyword youre targeting. This simply dilutes your sites relevance and reduces readability. Search engines and visitors alike will object the search engines will see your rankmaniac 2012 site as spam and visitors to your site will find it hard to read if rankmaniac 2012 not meaningless. A good rule of thumb is to aim for a sitewide average keyword density of around 2 measured using LiveKeywordAnalysis httpwww.livekeywordanalysis.com. Density is a measure of frequency in relation to the total wordcount of the page. So if your page has 200 words and your keyword phrase appears 10 times its density is 5. When you actually try to do this youll see that 2
isnt easy to achieve. The easiest way to do it is to be specific. As you write every sentence ask yourself Could I be more specific For example dont just say our computers or our products ask yourself if you can get away with saying our cheap second hand computers. Similarly dont say things like with our help instead say with rankmaniac 2012 the help of our cheap second hand computers. Once you get the hang of it youll find there are more than enough opportunities to replace a generic term with your keyword phrase. Obviously theres a bit of an art to it. Sometimes it ends up just sounding like youre repeating your keyword phrase over and over again. If this happens you may just need to restructure the sentence or paragraph. Remember your site reflects the quality of your rankmaniac 2012 product or service. If your site is hard to read people will infer a lot about rankmaniac 2012 your offering Readability is allimportant to visitors. And after all its the visitors who buy your product or service not the search engines. NOTE You dont need to be paranoid about density. You can have some pages which have a high density and some which have a low density. What if I want to target more than one keyword Its best to only target one keyword per page. If you try to target more your keywords will be competing against each other diluting each others impact. If you need to target more than one keyword simply create a page for each. For example divide your Second rankmaniac 2012 Hand Computers site into separate pages for Macs and PCs and then segment again into Notebooks Desktops etc. This way youll be able to incorporate very specific keyword phrases into your copy e.g. For your Macs page focus on cheap second hand macs. For the PCs page focus on cheap second hand pcs etc. See rankmaniac 2012 Link paths on p.22 for information on using text links between these pages. Where should I use my keywords When assessing what your website is about search engines pay close attention to the words you use in your text links and headings. So make sure your links and headings are keyword rich. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write rankmaniac 2012 Copywriting Pty Ltd 19 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 19 Using keywords in links When you link from one page to another try to use your target keyword as the link text the part thats normally blue and underlined. For example on your Cheap Second Hand Macs page you could include a text link to Cheap Second Hand PCs. IMPORTANT Search engines and humans like different things when it comes to links. Search engines like to see your keywords used toward the top of the page. So if youre using keywords in your links it makes sense that you put the links at the top of the page. Unfortunately humans tend to find this distracting. And because they start clicking on links before theyve finished reading the whole page they become easily lost and dont grasp the intended message. In most cases visitors prefer rankmaniac 2012 a text link at the bottom of the page. But there is a solution if you have links within the main body of your copy simply make them unmarked i.e. remove the blue font colour and the underlining. To do this include the following in your CSS file style typetextcss a textdecoration none style Then format the HTML of each link as follows As well as providing cheap second hand Macs we sell high quality a hrefpcs.htm styletextdecorationnonefont color000000cheap second hand pcsfonta. Using keywords in headings Just as customers rely on headings to scan your site so to do search engines. This means headings play a big rankmaniac 2012 part in how the search engines will index your site. Try to include your keyword phrase in your headings. In fact think about inserting extra headings just for this purpose. Generally this will also help the readability of the site because it will help customers scan read. For example if you have a page detailing the benefits of cheap second hand computers you could break it up into logical sections with the following headings. The cost benefits of cheap our second hand computers The technical benefits of our cheap second hand rankmaniac 2012 computers SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 20 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 20 The support benefits of our cheap second hand rankmaniac 2012 computers Using keywords at the start of the page Many SEO experts believe that the search engines see words at the start of a page rankmaniac 2012 as more representative of what your site is about than words at the end i.e. prominence. So its a good idea to make sure you use your keywords toward the start of each page. Optimizing your HTML code Within the HTML code behind your page there are things call meta tags. These are short notes within the header rankmaniac 2012 of the code which describe some aspects of your page to the search engines. Although there is some debate over how important meta tags are when rankmaniac 2012 it comes rankmaniac 2012 to SEO its generally agreed that they shouldnt be ignored. Whether youre building your website yourself or youre getting a web designer to do it its a good idea to understand the basics. There are four main meta tags you need to consider Tag name How it should look in the code Explanation Title titleCheap rankmaniac 2012 second hand The title is the most important of the computers Widget meta tags. Try to use your keyword at least once in the rankmaniac 2012 title. Computerstitle Also its not just important for your ranking it also has the biggest impact on your Click Thru Rate CTR. The text you put in the title will appear as the link text in your Google listing the bit that people will read first and click on. Think of it as an ad headline the better it is the more people will click on it. TIP Google only displays 66 characters in the clickable part of your listing. So try to keep your Title text to a max of rankmaniac 2012 66 characters. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting rankmaniac 2012 Pty Ltd 21 Step 4 Optimize Your rankmaniac 2012 Website for Search Engines 21 Tag name How it should look in the rankmaniac 2012 code Explanation Keywords meta nameKEYWORDS Search rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012 engines used to look only at this tag to identify a sites subject material. CONTENTcheap second hand This is no longer the case but they still computers pay some attention. Description meta nameDESCRIPTION The search rankmaniac 2012 engines pay some attention to this text when identifying your sites CONTENTCheap second hand subject material so make sure you computers for sale keeping include
your keyword at least once in the your business running Description. efficiently without breaking Also most search engines use this text the bank. as their description of your site i.e. its the site snapshot that follows your link in the search results. Make sure its informative and compelling. Think of it as the copy for an ad. TIP Google only displays about 160 characters including
spaces. So keep your Description text to a max of 160 characters. Alt img srcfilename.gif The Alt tag is designed to help visually altCheap second hand impaired people use the World Wide Web WWW. They use software to read out computer in use loud the content of your website. When titleCheap second hand the software encounters a picture it computer in use rankmaniac 2012 looks for the Alt text to learn what the picture is then reads that text out loud. The Alt tag is relatively important to search engines because they assume that your pictures have something to do with the subject material of your site. But like the visual aid software they cant actually see the picture so they look at the Alt text as well. Try rankmaniac 2012 to include your keyword at least once in your Alt text. You can use the same meta tags on each page or you can make them unique. It all depends on how many keywords youre targeting. If youre targeting a different keyword in the copy of each page your meta rankmaniac 2012 tags for each page will be unique i.e. youll target that pages keyword within these meta tags. TIP If you have any high ranking competitors take a look at the rankmaniac 2012 way theyve done their meta tags and follow their lead. You already know they rank highly so chances are theyve done a good job. SEO Secrets V1.3
Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 22 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 22 Optimizing your site structure When structuring the information on your website there are two main aspects you need to consider Multiple keywords Link paths Site map Multiple keywords Its good practice to structure your site around the keywords you want to target i.e. create a separate page for each keyword. For more information on structuring pages around keywords see What if I want to target more than one keyword on p.18. Link paths For search engine spiders text links are like doorways from page to page and site to site. This means websites are generally better indexed by search engines if their spiders can traverse the entire site using text links. If your site is simple you can simply link each page to every