Your keywords need to be chosen strategically – they need to truly reflect what your site is about. They need to be keywords people search for. They need to be used throughout your website strategically and correctly.
What is the purpose of your site? Try to write some paragraphs to describe your site. Look at what you wrote, and figure out good keywords that describe what you offer. Then go to a keyword program, like at Overture or goodkeywords.com and plug in your keywords to see related words. Can you justify using some of these other words or phrases? Use some lesser searched terms, as well, because you might have trouble fighting to get your site on the top of the popular searches, but not necessarily on the lesser search terms. This means you can pick up traffic that others are neglecting.
Use the keywords and terms several times throughout your site, but try not to hit over 8% -10% in density (number of times the keyword shows us compared to the number of word in the entire text of the site). Make sure you are at least 1%. If you have a “free” offers site, you can easily get carried away using the word “free” too many times. Tone it down in that case.
Use the keywords and phrases in your text, in your onmouseover description, on your graphics descriptions and file names, etc. Use them where you can, but do not use them as any type of hidden text, or you can get penalized.
Just use common sense without trying to be tricky, and you’ll do a whole lot better than the ones who try to trick the search engines – plus you’ll be less stressed in trying to figure out all the strategies – it’s not usually worth it.
P. Roe does website optimization work, and is working on her sites all the time – many are in number 1-10 ranking on Google and Yahoo! Subscribe to “Wise Little Tidbits” for more optimization tips. mailto:ezineshere@aol.com?WLT http://doubleii.com/webservices.htm
