Good rankings in search engines depend upon many factors, but one of the most important is having good informational content on a Web page with a good mix of the targeted keyword phrases. The targeted keyword phrases set the keyword theme for a Web page. The content and several other page elements reinforce the theme for the page and proper reinforcement typically leads to higher search engine rankings.

A keyword theme for a page is 1 to 3 related keyword phrases. Targeting too many keyword phrases becomes dilutive. Too much repetitive use of a word or phrase can be penalized as "keyword stuffing" by many search engines. The proximity of the words and phases also matters. If you need to repeat a word, space it out. Never do something like “scales, scales, scales, scales” or “digital sales, digital scales, digital scales” on a web page.

How do you know if you have too little or too few keyword phrases on a page? The easiest way is to check the keyword density for the page.

Target a keyword density of 3% to 5% for each keyword phrase. This is the number of times any words in the targeted phrases appear on the page relative to the total number of words on the page. To determine the keyword density, divide the total number of times any word in your targeted phrases appears on the page by the number of words on a page.

A simple method for counting the number of words on a page:

1. In Internet Explorer select Edit from the menu, then Select All
2. Right-click on the Web page an select Copy
3. Open Word and paste the copied content into a blank Word document
4. In Word, select File, Properties
5. Select Statistics from the dialog box
6. The word count is displayed in Words

To count the number of times a word, break down the individual words in your targeted phrases and use the Edit, Find (on This Page) function in Internet Explorer to count the number of times each word is found on the page. The same function is called Edit, Find in This Page in FireFox. Add the totals for each word and divide this number by the total word count and you have the keyword density.

One thing to note is that while this method calculates the use of any word in your targeted search phrases, there is real benefit with search engines if you make sure that each targeted phrase appears at least a couple of times on the page in the exact word order that you wish to target.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 11:34 am and is filed under Search Engines. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.