Chapter 3 - Keyword Phrases In The Content

Maximize Your Keyword Phrase In The Text

To get good rankings and increased traffic, you need good content. That content must clearly tell your customer who you are, what you offer, and how they can respond. So consider your Target Markets and your Marketing Focus for every page.

That content also needs to tell the search engines clearly who you are, what you're Website is all about.

Make sure you have a text page that is content rich in the theme of the keyword phrase for the page.

See Chapter 8 for sites that have special challenges due to the use of graphics, Flash, frames, and elements strategies.

A good range of words in the text is between 150-200 words. If you don't have pages like this in your Grid, you'll need to consider developing additional pages for the Website that you are able to provide this kind of text content. Articles, descriptions of products, and descriptions of services are a good way to add content. Having a Blog to focus on content with good keyword phrases is also an excellent way to include your keyword phrases. Everything you do for content pages on your site you need to do for your Blog content pages

Aaron Wall, SEOBook.com, suggests making sure your content is easy to read, using formatting to break up the content with:

• Short paragraphs
• bulleted or numbered lists (where relevant)
• relevant headers and sub headers throughout for easier scanning of searchers and search engines
• Conversion-focused links within the content area of each page.

Strive for a keyword density of 1-2% for the keyword phrases being targeted, a Primary and a Secondary one for each page.

The 150-200 word page should have the keyword included in the text of between 1-2%. Each search engine has a little different number they like to see, but somewhere in this range is a good beginning. Later, you will learn more about studying your ranking and making adjustments for different search engines if that's needed.

Include all the following that is possible for your site.

• Begin each page with a sentence that includes the keyword. Use a Header tag, not a font. Your developer can use Cascading Style Sheets so that your Header 1 tag can be in a better font size for your site. 

This is not always possible, but Google and other search engines seem to recognize the first full sentence as being important for a site and if it has the keyword in it, this may likely be what the site is about. 

They also recognize that an HTML Header in an initial sentence is probably more indicative of something important about a page. Some search engines will include the first sentence of your site in their results description.

• Make sure the keyword phrase is included in the first 25 words of the page.
• Put the keyword phrase in the first sentence of various paragraphs.

This is called "prominence" search engines use an algorithm (a rules set for evaluation) to decide what you page is about. So you want to make it easy for them to find the information and know these words are important enough to be included early in the content of the page.
• Make keyword phrase text links to other pages in the site.

Remembering the principle that the algorithms are determining what your pages are about, having a link to something indicates it's probably an important area. So when you can, make that a text link of your keyword phrases. 2-4 on each page is a good target number..
• Remembering the principle that the algorithms are determining what your pages are about, having a link to something indicates it's probably an important area. So when you can, make that a text link of your keyword phrases. 2-4 on each page is a good target number.

Here is a content, copywriting approach that integrates keyword phrases to gain search engine ranking and drive traffic. Creating Content - A Copywriting Plan

Not only must you have keyword rich text for individual pages, a strong thematic content throughout the Website is also important. This is becoming even more vital with Google's algorithm that is including technology from a purchase of a company specializing in Latent Symantic Indexing.

"Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn't understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent."

This means that all pages within your site are being evaluated so that the actual keyword phrases you are targeting as they are related to other phrases that are semantically close will help Google to determine that all the themes or topics that are similar could also be related to the keyword phrase you have already targeted.

In real estate, for example, if you targeted keyword phrase is [Atlanta real estate], all the pages that refer to property, homes for sale, land, condominiums, rentals, and other key references to Atlanta can all help your keyword phrase [Atlanta real estate] because these words also relate to real estate and to Atlanta.

Therefore...

• Whenever possible have a large number of pages that cover as many areas as possible within the theme or topic of your principle keywords.
• Keep as consistent a theme as possible for your website.That is, have a strong overall thematic emphasis for your Website. If you have widely differing products or services, consider having a multiple of sites that emphasize each theme or topic.
• Look beyond your primary target keyword phrases to include synonyms, antonyms, similar stem roots, anything that is semantically close to your primary keyword phrases.

In the next Chapter we will explain how to magnify what you have in your text so search engines have more assurance you are about what you say you are about. Proceed to Chapter 4, Keywords In The HTML.