How to Build Your Web Page for Maximum Hits

Thanks for the informative post!. You have highlighted many important peices that can help for maximizing hits. Interested reader can also find "5 ways to make your website visible to the search engines" useful.

I wonder if all serach engines scan information from your web page in the same fashion and from the same feilds?.

There are other search engines out there. Ask.com, Windows Live come to mind along with a couple of others. Why the mention of Google as the only one?

JFJ

Thanks for that followup to your original, post, Jessica... I appreciated the examples offered above in the blog you wrote -- mind pointing us to a couple pages that demonstrate that "natural" sounding repetition you describe, or that use punctuation to break up the syntax? SEO is such a moving target that it would be a huge help to our readers to see how this plays out on live Web pages.

There are a couple of mentions below about the keywords needing to be incorporated naturally, I agree 100%. Any company should be very conscious about what goes on their website, and there is no need to write in a way that is unnatural.

I train a lot of in-house copywriting teams and their first question is always, “where do we place the keywords?” and that was the focus of the article.

The concept of how to weave in keywords to sound natural is an article unto itself, one of the ways mentioned below is to use synonyms, but you still need a few exact repetitions.

Another copywriting technique for including exact repetitions, without sounding like you are repeating is to break up the keywords with special characters such as: - , & ; :

For example, if your keyword is “honda accord gold rims” you can weave this quirky keyword into a sentence such as:

“Young men like to customize their Honda accord, gold rims and fuzzy dice float are the latest trends.”

While you may not use this sentence on your website, you can get an idea of how to use special characters to break up keywords, without negatively impacting the readability of the content on your site.

SEO Copywriting has so many facets that there are a couple of books on it, my recommendation is the book by Heather Lloyd Martin:
http://www.searchenginewriting.com/order-seo-writing-book.shtml

I'm hearing mixed things about the use of keywords. From a writer's viewpoint, it's important to put keywords in headlines and decks, much more so than it used to be in print, since machines takes things literally.

On the other hand, if you use keywords in a "stuffing" manner, you start looking like the businesses that used to call themselves AAA just to get listed first in the phonebook.

Picking up a point that Ann Smarty made earlier, another way you can stop your web pages looking spammy by overuse of keywords is to use a few synonyms as well.  Google incorporates latent semantic analysis in its mechanisms so to an extent it is searching for meanings rather than precise words.  That isn't to take away from the importance of the main keywords either.

 Another small tuning point is that I believe keywords appearing in the starting and closing paragraphs may be given greater weights.  After all the Google algorithm is trying to serve up web pages that a  human would find relevant.  So a rule that works for humans may well be figured into the algorithm.

Google points out in various places that it does not pay any attention to meta tags, and also warns that key word overuse may place your page at a disadvantage, although doesn't give you their secret forumulas.

But, unsaid is that Google does still rely heavily on how many other "important" websites link to yours.  That might be the one most important factor for a web page that has a common theme.

On the other hand, if your page subject is fairly unique and uses key words that are little used, your page should appear near the top fairly quickly. I've seem my pages rise to the top in as as little as a few days or less.

Jessica,

Not long ago, in another life, I was involved in SEO for a small company in Georgia.  In all my research (and some interaction with Google staff directly) I remember being told (or reading) that the META tag was no longer important to the SEO process and, in fact, could get your listing reduced or even get you delisted if you abused it.

Perhaps that has changed, but I cannot see that it would have since there are still a lot of spam sites that live by overloading the META tag with the same word or putting irrelevant search terms in the tag itself -- effectively crossposting it into incorrect search results.

Having said all of that, what about the use of the Semantic web technologies? Have search engines matured enough to actually be able to make use of this emerging philosophy of ontologies, compact URI's, and things like FOAF?

This is very accurate article and a great introduction to the topic. However, I agree with seosmarty on the importance of natural language use. Oversaturating a page with keywords (keyword stuffing) will damage your SEO results. So those new to SEO should keep in mind that while writing does indeed need to be geared towards search engine apps (crawlers, spiders) in an effort to increase site visibility,  content always needs to be usable and readable by humans first and foremost. If people can't read it and use it, there's no point.

Also, for those looking for more info on the subject, Google recently released a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

 A bit of light shed on the mystery by the masters.

Hi,

I just learned that studying how your web site is searched and referred to through the Google analytics is very useful.

I still have a question, though. Do you think that registering our Web site URL to the internet directory (Yahoo or DMOZ) really helps our ranking? And if so, how much?