SEO - threading your keywords

Author: Lee Rixon

Having carefully selected your keyword phrase - now its time to start 'threading' it into your web pages.

A number of years ago - it was simply a matter of entering it into your meta tags under keywords and away you went. Not so anymore!

Search engines providers such as Google are in the business of trying to deliver relevant content to their customers. To that end, for them to be successful, they need to have proprietary algorithms that they use to rank pages for particular search phrases. Those algorithms are continually being revised and are a 'trade secret' of that search engine.

When you optimise a page, really what you are doing is trying to guess how the search engine's algorithm will 'score' your page, and do everything you can do to increase that score. Each search engine is different, and having a page that works well for Google will not necessarily work as well for Yahoo or MSN . What we are going to do is talk about some general optimisation techniques that will help your page relevance, but discussion of full optimisation is much more complex. If you want a detailed review of any of your pages, then contact us and we will be happy to provide one for you.

The HTML page consists of three levels of information.

Always visible content

Sometimes visible content

Never visible content

Visible content consists of items such as page title, headings, page verbiage and hyperlink text.

Sometimes visible content consists of items such as image tags and hyperlink titles.

Never visible content consists of items such as meta tags.

These days, the search engines are paying much more attention to visible content, than either sometimes visible or invisible. Don't ignore these categories, but spend your time on the visible content for best results.

Page title

This is a key element for most search engines. You should try to ensure that the words contained in your keyphrase are threaded into this page title. Again, remember that this is something that will be viewed on search engine result lists and also in browser windows, so try to make it a good marketing phrase as well. Keep the title relatively short.

Headings

Most search engines consider headings to be more important than plain page text. They also consider H1 headings to be more important than H4 headings. Try to thread your key phrase into a heading somewhere in the page, preferably close to the top. Don't go overboard with this, as the search engines will also be looking at the ratio of heading text to plain text and will most likely penalize you if your whole page is a heading.

Plain text

You need to strike a balance here. It is important that your key phrase is contained in the boy of the plain text of the page, but too much can get you penalized. A reasonably good guideline is to 'thread' it into the content twice or three times. Also remember that this is your marketing copy too, so ensure that the insertion of your key phrase doesn't mess up your copy.

More later......

About the author: Lee is one of the principals at Spinnaker Systems which provides Web related services to the small business owner. Lee can be contacted at lee@spinnakersystems.com and is a regular contributor to the Spinnaker Blog