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| Author: Jason Ciment |
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Overview of Keyword Placement and Frequency In the BODY Section: This section gives you examples and instructions on how to place your keywords into every content page. There is a bit of a mathematical science to this process and following the guidelines is extremely vital to the success of your SEO campaigns.
The main components of on-page content considerations are generally:
- Headers/Headlines
- Alternate Font Styles
- Bulleted Lists
- Copyright Statement
- Breadcrumbs
- Links
- Images
- Comments
- Keyword Stemming
- Stopgap Words
- Fresh Content
- Google Adsense
A more detailed approach to putting keywords into your body content might consist of using this 12 step checklist approach:
- Primary keyword phrase in <h1> at top of page content
- Primary keyword phrase match the content in the <title> tag
- Secondary keyword phrase should be in </h2> tag in middle
- Alternative keyword phrase in <h3> tag in middle or end
- Sprinkle primary keywords for 3-7% density on page
- Some primary keywords should be in an "alternate font style"
- Links with keyword rich anchor text (plus title tag inside link)
- Images named with keyword rich names, plus use alt tags
- Use a bullet list of a few items with alternate keywords
- Put primary keyword plus extra couple of words into copyright
- Breadcrumbs on every page (home link to be keyword rich)
- For semantic indexing, use alternate synonymic content
Day 2 (Learn about it), Day 3-8 (Apply it)
Headers/Headlines
The first header on your page (which of course should be at the top of your body content) should not exactly match the "title" of the page but it should have similar words. The reason you don't want to match the title exactly to the headers – especially the first h1 header - is because the search engines will think that you are trying to "game the system" and it looks too spammy.
Here are 3 types of keyword rich headers for one page with the following title tag: "Ecommerce Software Shopping Cart Software":
- Primary:
Company providing Ecommerce software Shopping Cart solutions
- Secondary:
WebCart offers compelling E-commerce Software
- Complementary:
Shopping Cart Software is key to business success
If you look at the sample template, you will see that the first text on the page (highlighted in yellow) in the body is actually an H1 tag which reads "The Ultimate 3 in 1 Shopping Cart Software And Easy to Use Ecommerce Solutions" (the extra words around the primary keywords makes the content more legitimate). If you are wondering how this h1 header appears before the logo and left navigation in the source code, reference sections 7-10 on page design and CSS.
Alternate Font Styles:
How you write your keywords into a page is critically important and directly affects which keywords will get ranked. The font styles you select tell the engines that certain text on the page is "more important" than other text on the page. Therefore, you want to use the 5 font attributes below to highlight the keywords you want picked up by the search engines. There is no magic formula here unfortunately. Generally, you should apply at least one of each font styles to a version of your primary keyword.
Interestingly, this technique is one of those times that CSS may actually work against you because if you don't actually use the font styles below and you instead substitute CSS styling, the engines are not yet that sophisticated to figure out from a that something is bold or italic.
Here are the 5 most prominent font styles you should use. You can just substitute your keyword phrases where indicated below.
- Bold Keyword Phrase
- Italic Keyword Phrase
- Underline Keyword Phrase
- Emphasize Keyword Phrase
- Strong Keyword Phrase
Bulleted Lists:
In the same way that use of alternate font styles suggests to the search engine algorithms that certain content is "more valuable" than other content on the page, you can accomplish this with numbered (ol) or unnumbered (ul) bulleted lists.
Here is an example of how you make a bulleted list and as before just substitute your keyword phrases were indicated inside the list:
- Keyword Phrase 1
- Keyword Phrase 2
- Keyword Phrase 3
Here is an example of how a bulleted list would appear on your page.
Copyright Section:
For some reason, the text in your copyright sentence appears to be another flag to the search engines that certain content is worth noting. If your website is "WebCart.net" and your primary keyword for the WebCart home page is "Shopping Cart Software" you would enter "© WebCart.net, Shopping Cart Software". You can add a © to every individual page, and use your primary keyword—for that page--followed by the company name in the copyright.
Here's an example of what a copyright area would look like:
Breadcrumbs:
Breadcrumbs are usually included in most content management or ecommerce systems. The breadcrumbs serve two purposes in a web site.
The first purpose is to help the actual site visitor to more easily navigate through site. By providing a link which displays the natural hierarchy of the site, the visitor is quickly able to figure out two things: where he/she is in your site and how to backtrack level by level all the way up to the home page.
The second purpose of having breadcrumbs is to tell the search engines that your site has a structure and to help the engines to identify where each page of your site fits into the keyword picture you are trying to paint.
Here is a traditional example of what a breadcrumb looks like on a product page of an ecommerce site:
Home >> category >> product or more specifically Home >> Systems >> SKU
There are a few things that should be changed though in order to improve the effect of using breadcrumbs:
- Instead of just saying "home", try to us your site's primary keyword phrase with the word home following the keywords.
- Instead of using just the word "Systems", you could use keywords there too – like "Ecommerce Systems"
- Instead of using the Product SKU, you could use the product name or even the product name with some keywords attached to the name.
With these enhancement suggestions, your breadcrumb could now become:
Shopping Cart Software Home >> Ecommerce Systems >> WebCart Shopping Cart Platform
Links:
Writing a link on a web page involves a lot more than just the technical creation of a link. There are a variety of options to consider when constructing a link:
- Anchor text – this is what actually appears on the web page connected to the hyperlink (usually underlined unless you turn it off with CSS). For an example see http://www.seotimetable.com/links/anchortext.jpg
- Title of link – this does not appear on the screen but the fact that the search engines can include this information in their database means you have an opportunity to pass along keyword rich details to the search engines.
- The page name (URL) you are linking to – though this too does not appear on the screen, it is relevant as an "outbound link" criteria and it fits into the whole concept of thematic structuring of pages and sites.
To put all these considerations into layman's English, here's what you need to know. Your keywords should be written into your links because doing so accomplishes two things. If you remember at the start of this document we talked about on-page (read content) and off-page (read linking) optimization. Well, linking is the one item in all of your SEO techniques that can kill two birds with one stone.
By putting your keywords into the anchor text, title and URL, you meet the needs of on-page optimization. By putting your keywords into the link, you also meet off-page optimization requirements, because even though the link is within your site, it still counts as a vote for the content of the page you are linking to. If this all sounds a bit like circular logic, then back to the analogy of the swimmer and consider that you don't have to understand how everything works yet, you just have to do it.
Here are some helpful tips to get you through the linking process:
This is what a properly structured link looks like from a technical perspective.
Anchor text Keyword Phrase
Here is an example of what the actual link structure would look like if the link is linking from index page to the Ecommerce Survey page. The TITLE of the link should consist of a keyword followed by the word "link" in order to prevent your page from getting any spam reductions.
shopping cart software
Images:
Image optimization is pretty easy because you only have two things to worry about - the filename of the image and the image description.
The first guideline is that you should have your keywords at least a few times as different image names on each page. Example: shoppingcartsoftware.jpg, ecommercesoftware.jpg (or ecommerce_software.jpg)
The second guideline is to include the ALT tag with keyword rich descriptions plus the word "image" or "graphic" in the alt tag. Remember, not to stuff each alt tag with more than one keyword phrase. Here are some examples that should help:
- ex: alt="keyword[s] Graphic" or alt="keyword[s] image"
- ex: alt="ecommerce graphic" or alt="shopping cart image"
- ex:
Comment Tags:
It is debatable whether to put keyword rich content inside comment tags. If you do, the rules are just like everywhere else. Don't stuff keywords and don't go overboard. Just do it as naturally as you can.
The structure of a comment tag is
Keyword Stemming:
This refers to the process of enhancing your keywords with different suffix and prefix extensions. A search with the keyword "cheap" might return results for, "cheaper" and "cheapest" so you want to have those keywords in your content too by sprinkling the longer version of keywords throughout your page.
As well, if the keyword phrase is "Shopping Cart Software", you would want to sprinkle "Shopping", "Cart", & "Software" individually throughout the page.
Stop Gap Words:
Avoid these unnecessary words as much as possible when writing content for the site: a, about, above, across, after, again, against, air, all, almost, along, also, always, an, and, animals, another, answer, any, are, around, as, asked, at, away, back, be, because, been, before, began, being, below, best, better, between, big, both, boy, boys, but, by, called, came, can, change, children, city, come, could, country, day, days, did, different, do, does, don't, down, during… etc.
Fresh Updated Content:
Every week, content needs to be updated so search engines think you are still relevant and hence worth ranking higher than your competitors (who may have more stale content). The easiest way to do this is to change part of your home page content every week. Another additional technique is to change one sub page article every other week that links from the home page.
There are a variety of software options to help automate this task. Be aware though that the primary problem with these automated solutions is that they use duplicate content from other sites and you run the risk that the search engines won't value your content as highly as if it were unique. Here are 4 examples:
1. Pull Rss Feeds using software like RSS Equalizer, Power RSS
2. Add RSS Feeds with keywords related to your site's theme
- http://www.feedster.com
- http://www.completerss.com
- http://www.RSSInsane.com
3. Article Scraping (pulls articles from other article repositories)
- http://www.authoritysitecenter.com
- Site Builder Pro
- Article Post Robot
4. Another site that gives you free content might include Emediawire.com
Google Adsense:
It is debatable whether adding Google sense helps your site get ranked in Google. Since it doesn't seem to hurt results, here are some thoughts to consider.
- One ad somewhere small and at bottom
- Get an application at: https://www.google.com/adsense
- Use Google Ads at the bottom of pages.
- Make them blend into site design.
- Google claims the most effective sizes for click-throughs are
- 326x280
- 300x250 (inline rectangle)
- 160x600 (wide skyscraper)
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