Designing a site to be SEO-friendly encompasses a wide range of topics that include the general structure of the site and its hierarchy, principles and content ratio of individual pages, and specifics of using HTML tags.
Keyword density means the ratio of keywords that you are trying to target for SEO purposes to the other text on your pages. Getting keyword density right—enough so that your SEO goals are achieved, not so much that the search engines are “offended”—is an important goal of core SEO practice. Search engines do look for keywords, but they take away points for excessive and inappropriate keyword “stuffing.”
Even from the point of view of your site visitors, you want a nice density of keywords in your pages—but you don’t want so many keywords that the content of your pages is diminished from the viewpoint of visitors.
It is certainly true that which keywords you use is more important than how many of them there are. Your main focus should be on finding the right keywords, not counting them.
The following are some design and information architecture guidelines you should apply to your site to optimize it for search engines.
For most sites, the fancy graphics do not matter. If you are
looking for search engine placement, it is the words that count.
Always use text instead of—or in addition to—images to display
important names, content, and links. Where it’s reasonable, add a
title attribute to anchor tags to
provide the bot with more information about the destination and
purpose of hyperlinks.
Pages within your site should be structured with a clear hierarchy. Several alternative site navigation mechanisms should be supplied, including at least one that is text-only. The major parts of your site should be easy to access using a site map. If your site map has more than 100 links, you should divide the site map into separate pages (as a matter of usability, not in relation to Google’s analysis).
By now, you probably understand that the most important thing you can do on the SEO front involves the words on your pages.
There are three issues you need to consider when placing keywords on a page:
How many words should be on a page?
Which words belong on what page?
Where should these be placed on the page?
Ideally, pages should be between 100 and 250 words. Shorter than 100 words, and Google and other search engines may tend to discount the page as unsubstantial. Personally, as a photographer I tend to resent this anti-image bias. But from an SEO standpoint, you should know the facts of life as they are. The Web started as a primarily text-based medium, and the underlying technology still tends to prefer words.
You do want to include as many keywords as you can without destroying the value and integrity of the site. Besides decreasing the value to humans, you don’t want the bot to think you have created a spam site. There’s a balance here. With fewer than 100 words, any significant inclusion of keywords is going to look like keyword stuffing—and get “points” taken off your pages.
Pages that are longer than 250 words are not terrible, but do tend to diminish traffic—both actual and measured as a per page statistic. From the viewpoint of advertising, lengthy pages waste content; 250 words is about as many as will fit on a single monitor screen, so your visitors will have to scroll down to finish reading the rest of the page if you publish longer pages. You might as well provide navigation to additional pages for the content beyond the 250 words—and gain the benefit of having extra pages to host advertising.
Some sites prefer to run longer pages and rotate ads with the page still loaded. This should be considered a good option for any page with an average page view of a minute or longer.
The bottom line is that it’s best to create pages that have between 100 and 250 words. These words should include some keywords that are desirable, but don’t overdo it. If the sentences on the page appear unnatural because they are full of keywords, they have probably been “keyword stuffed”—which is counterproductive.
Beyond the mechanics of crafting sites and pages that are search-engine friendly lies another issue: what search queries does your site answer? You need to understand this to find the keywords to emphasize in your site construction—a very important part of Search Engine Optimization.
Keywords used in the body of a page can duplicate the keywords used in meta tags. However, it’s important to understand that the keywords within a page are far more important than the meta tag information.
Keywords are emphasized by their placement within a page. For
example, important keywords should go in a page’s HTML <title> and in <h1> headers. It’s best to craft
titles and tags that reasonable and logically use the target
keywords, but this can’t always be done, and you can always add a
few keywords to the phrase used for the title attribute within tags
such as the <h1>
tag.
There’s no magic bullet for coming up with the right keywords to place in a page. A good starting place is the elevator pitch and related keywords, as explained in Chapter 2. You can also take a look at your competition to see if their optimization makes sense in terms of titles, keywords, and so on.
It’s fundamental to your success to vary keywords used in a page depending on the page content, rather than trying to stuff a one-size-fits-all approach across all the pages on your site. In fact, Google will definitely take points off if it finds that all the pages on your site emphasize the same keywords.
If the answer is X, for example, what is the question? This is the right way to consider keyword choice. X is your website or web page. What did someone type into Google to get there?
The Top Search Queries page on the Statistics tab of Google Webmaster Tools will, to some extent, answer this question for you. This page will tell you the top 20 search queries that returned your site. Bear in mind that you may need to know about more than the top 20 searches (this is the province of web logs and web analytics programs, as explained in Chapter 13). In addition, the Google Webmasters information is at least a week old, which may not be fresh enough for quickly moving sites.
As you come up with keywords and phrases, try them out. Search Google based on the keywords and phrases. Ask yourself if the results returned by Google are where you would like to see your site. If not, tweak, modify, wait for Google to re-index your site (this won’t take too long once you’ve been initially indexed), and try your search again.
Ultimately, the best way to measure success is relative. It’s easy to see how changes impact your search results ranking—just keep searching (as often as once a day) for a standard set of half a dozen keywords or phrases that you’ve decided to target. If you are moving up in the search rankings, then you are doing the right thing. If your ranking doesn’t improve, then reverse the changes. If you get search results to where you want them (usually within the top 30 or even top 10 results returned), then start using these results to optimize additional pages.
You should also realize that the success that is possible for a given keyword search depends upon the keyword. It’s highly unlikely that you will be able to position a site into the top results for, say, “Google” or “Microsoft”—but trivial to get to the top for keywords phrases with no natural search results (such as “nigritude ultramarine” or “loquine glupe,” two nonsense phrases that became the fodder for SEO contests).
The trade-off here is that it is a great deal harder to place at the top of natural search listings with keywords that are valuable—so you need to find a sweet spot: keywords where you stand a chance, but that also will drive significant site-related traffic.
Since feedback is ultimately determined by financial incentive, an interesting approach to keyword selection is to see what words cost the most to advertisers. If you are registered with Google AdWords, you can use the AdWords tools as explained in Part III to do just that—and get valid cost estimates for keywords and phrases.
The text on your web page should include the most important keywords you have developed in as unforced a way as possible. Try to string keywords together to make coherent sentences.
Not all text on a page is equal in importance. First of all, order does count: keywords higher up in a given page get more recognition from search engines than the same keywords further down on a page.
Roughly speaking, besides the body of the page itself and in meta information, you should try to place your keywords in the following elements—presented roughly in order of descending importance:
Putting relevant keywords in the HTML <title> tag for your page is
probably the single most important thing you can do in terms of
SEO.
Keyword placement within HTML header styles, particularly
<h1> headers toward the
top of a page, is extremely important.
Use your keywords as much as possible in the text that is
enclosed by <a
href="">...</a> hyperlink tags on your site
in outbound and cross-bound links. Ask webmasters who provide
inbound linking to your site to use your keywords whenever
possible.
Include your keywords in the alt
attribute of your HTML <img> tags.
If there is any reasonable excuse for doing so, include
your keywords within HTML bold (<b>...</b>)
tags.
The saying, “Everything in moderation, even moderation” is a good principle to keep in mind when you tweak your website to achieve SEO. The moderation slogan has been aptly applied to many human activities, from the sexual to the gustatory and beyond. It fits very well with SEO.
For example, you want a nice density of keywords in your pages, but you don’t want so many keywords that the content of your pages is diminished from the viewpoint of visitors. Search engines look for keywords, but they take away points for excessive and inappropriate keyword “stuffing.”
Try to see the world from a search engine bot’s viewpoint (that’s the point of using a text-only browser as I explained in More About How Your Site Appears to a Bot). Create sites that appeal when looked at this way, but go easy. Don’t overdo it!
The following are some design and information architecture guidelines you should apply to your site to optimize it for search engines.
Fancy graphics do not matter for most sites. When it comes to search engine placement, it is the words that count.
Use text rather than images to display important names, content, and links.
Make sure you provide accurate alt attribute text for any images that
are on your pages.
Pages within your site should be structured with a clear hierarchy. Several alternative site-navigation mechanisms should be supplied, including at least one that is text-only.
Every page in your site should be accessible using a static text link.
The major parts of your site should be easy to access using a site map (Figure 4-9 shows an example of a useful site map). If your site map has more than 100 links, you should divide the site map into separate pages.
Your human site map should not be confused with a site map prepared for search engines, as explained in Chapter 3.