Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Website Keyword Placement Advice For Maximum Search Engine Exposure

This article is intended to outline the best places in your web pages to place keywords for maximum search engine benefit. It covers HTML tags and which ones are most beneficial to use when marking up your text content and keywords.

It may seem like an obvious thing but I would like to make the point that you really need a shortlist of keywords that you would like to promote on each page. To keep your pages on topic I would suggest a maximum of 3 related key phrases per page to achieve optimal results. If you try to optimise a web page for lots of different phrases it becomes a huge mess that isn't really focused around any keyphrase in particular - a situation that ought to be avoided!
Search engines love text! As a general guide the more text that is on a page the better for search engines as it gives them more text to analyse to determine what the page is actually about. I suggest a bare minimum of 300 words for a search engine targeted entry page.

Once you have your shortlist of keywords down on paper it is best to highlight what you consider to be your best and most popular target key phrase. This is important as it will be placed in some important places that are essential for effective search engine optimisation.

When you begin to build your web page you should make sure that you include your main target key phrase in:

Your pages META title tag (this will display in the blue bar at the top of your browser)
Your pages top level heading tag or H1 tag
You opening paragraph
Throughout your subsequent paragraphs

These places in your pages are essential as this is where search engines give special priority. Any keywords and key phrases that you can get into your pages in bold, italic or anchor tags are also a benefit and promote your pages relevance to these terms.

The opening paragraph of your page is given a heavy weighting by search engines as it is assumed that most people use this paragraph to describe the page content that follows. A good tip is to use level two heading tags to mark up this paragraph. I use CSS to style the resulting text and this trick usually works a treat!

The main text content of your page after your opening paragraph should be broken up into sensible chunks and marked up with, yes you guessed it, - paragraph tags. When writing the body text for your page use your keywords as liberally as you can feasible use them without making your text sound too repetitive. Remember your text has to be readable to users as well as attractive to search engines.

Conclusion:

By using this simple strategy for placing your keywords you can make sure that your content is laid out optimally for effective 'on page' SEO (the easy side of SEO). On page SEO may be easier than off page SEO but you still have to get it right! Putting your keywords in the right places is essential in todays crowded online marketplace.

http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Website-Keyword-Placement-Advice-For-Maximum-Search-Engine-Exposure/258920