On-Page Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Keywords & Writing Effective Content

The one of the biggest factors in your search engine ranking is going to be your keywords, or what words appear on your pages. Choosing the right keywords is vitally important, but we've already covered that, instead this section will deal with how to include those keywords in your writing. While search engines once used to rely on keywords found in your meta tags to rank your page they now have more sophisticated software that analyzes the text on your page and not only checks for keywords or phrases, but also checks that they are in a proper form and not just repeated over and over again.

Keywords have always been an integral part in determining your search engine rank. In early days the search engines would simply count how many time a word was used on each page and whichever page used it the most would get the top listing. This resulted in people repeating words thousands of times on their pages, usually with a text color the same as their background to make the words seem invisible. Now not only do search engines ignore, or even ban, sites that repeat keywords, they also will do it with sites that have text the same color as the background.

Keyword volume or density is still important though, and so you must try to include both your main keywords (the ones you most hope to rank well one) prominently, as well as as many minor keyword as you can.

For instance consider the following passage:

Welcome to Ray's Photography Resource. Photography is a very complicated skill and you don't always know or remember all of the techniques you need to produce a better product. Or maybe you are have trouble keeping up on industry news and recently developed new techniques. If so you can find the answers you seek here. We have articles on many different topics from this industry, and we add new ones every week. We can help you find the right equipment with our extensive reviews section. Finally we can offer you a place to display your work for others to see. Whether you're a professional or amateur we have what you need.

On the surface it sounds fairly typical but from a keyword perspective it is horrible. The only place I even mention words related to the topic of the site is in the first two sentences, the rest of it could have been written about anything.

Now consider the following passage and notice the difference:

Welcome to Ray's Photography Resource. Photography is a very complicated skill and you don't always know or remember all of the lightning or developing techniques you need to produce better photos.. Or maybe you have trouble keeping up on photography industry news and recently developed photo editing processes. If so you can find the answers you seek to your photography related questions here. We have articles covering all facets of photography, from lighting, to film, to lenses, to editing, and we add new ones every week. We can help you find the right camera, lights, film, or editing software with our extensive reviews section. Finally we can offer you a place to display your finished photos for others to see. Whether you're a professional photographer or an amateur we have what you need.

The second passage has significantly more keywords and more repetitions of those keywords. What you need to do is model your content like the second passage. Try to fit as many keywords as many times as possible without resorting to simple repetition. People will hopefully use more than one word or phrase to find your site so make sure you get some variety in there, just so long as it relates to your topic.

Squeezing in Minor Keywords

It is really difficult to rank on a page for a keyword that does not appear on the page. Often if you have a keyword mentioned just once on a page it can make the difference between ranking in the 100s or a ranking in the top 10. The concept of the long tail that I previously talked about is applicable here as well. For many sites there can be hundreds, or thousands, of obscure search terms they could rank well for if they just had a few minor keywords on more pages of their site.

One easy way to make sure you always get your major and minor keywords on your site is to use a boilerplate sentence or two as a site description. Typically you can find these in the footer of a site along with a copyright statement. Such as follows:

Site Copyright Acme Inc. All Rights Reserved. Acme Inc is a provider of shipping supplies, commercial mailers, packaging materials, overnight services, and more in East Lansing, Michigan. We proudly serve Ingham, Clinton, & Jackson counties.

You don't want to make it too long as Google reps have stated that long boilerplates can end up being negated as duplicate content. However a simple one or two sentences can serve to get a dozen or so prime keywords onto every page of your website. Don't worry about keywords found in your site name or other words that already end up on every page. Instead focus on a selection of minor keywords that do not always get mentioned. If you need help picking them, go back and do some keyword research.