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Keywords
Keyword frequency, density, keyword-rich title tags, description tags and key phrase placement within the body of your page are very important things to think about if you want high rankings on search engines. However, remember that keywords are just one part of your overall optimization plan.
Keyword Strategy
To enjoy any type of success on the internet you need to know what people are searching for and then optimize your site to what people are searching for. Finding what keywords to optimize your site for is one of the first steps you need to perform. You do this by finding out what keywords and what keyword phrases people are using to find what they want. Your web site should provide people with what they are searching for. Having a web site optimized for a keyword phrase that no one is searching for will get you nowhere.
If you’re starting a web site from scratch, I recommend you select for keywords first. If you select your keywords first, you can then design the site based on those keywords. I personally do not recommend optimizing a single web page for more than 2 keyword phrases. If you sell 20 different products then plan on 20 different pages.
Keyword Brainstorming
You need to try and think like your customer, brainstorm, and find the target keywords your customers are likely to use when searching. When you’re brainstorming for keywords, write down anything that comes to mind. Once you’ve compiled a good size list, prune it down.
Fortunately there are some free tools available to help you determine what keywords and keyword phrases people are searching for.
Overture Suggestion Tool
Wordtracker Trial Version
goodkeywords.com (based on the Overture keyword suggestion tool.)
Keep in mind there is a certain margin of error with any of these tools. Everything has an error margin. Not even your server logs are truely precise.
Title Tag
Keywords that appear in the Title Tag must also appear in the body of the page.
Keyword Density in the Body
To achieve good rankings in a search engine, you need to study the relationship between the keyword density (KWD) and the rankings on that search engine.
The average number of words per page in Google is 943. The average number of words per page in Yahoo is 1,305. Yahoo likes their pages a little longer.
Yahoo’s average keyword density is 2.8% while Google’s is 2.0%.
Keywords in Links
Carefully choose the names of your internal and external links. Keywords in links should always describe the page. Name your page using keywords that describe your page. If your page is about keyword density the name of the page should be keyword-density.htm. If you use a hypen or an underscore the search engines will read the keywords in the url. Never run the keywords together as in keyworddensity.htm. If you run the keywords together, the search engine will read it as one word and won’t help your rankings for your keywords.