Mar
22
Filed Under (SEO Tips) by Mani Karthik on 22-03-2007

If you are serious about SEO, your life should be all about “Keywords”. Because they form the muscles of your site, they are like protein to your body. And if you wanna have a well built body with well formed muscles, you got to supplement it with the right “proteins”.Simple as that!

So think of Google as a sexy lass - and your site a hunk.Well assume that you are not a hunk right now and is a lanky guy,weak.And you got to woo her.So what would you do?Dress up in those fancy apparels, and flash off to her?Well, she may give a glance - but not for long - once she knows that you are not what you really looks like - she’ll move on to the next guy around.

This is exactly what happens when the google bot visits your site. You have dressed up in all those fancy clothes with no real strong body and no muscles to flash, and you fail to impress her. She really likes strong men. ;)

So start eating your proteins today.Keywords that is.

Select a good “keyword” for your site from a niche using any of the following tools.
Overture Suggestion, Good Keywords
Overture is a free tool and even good keywords - but they don’t show the google statistics but yahoo. So you can assume that for a particular keyword, the traffic on yahoo multiplied by 4 will give you the google traffic.

Example - Keyword - “SEO India” on yahoo stands at “100″ searches, it is probably 400 on google.

After you’ve selected your keyword, there are a few points that you should remember when writing articles.

- Keyword density in body text

Keyword density can be explained as the number of times the particular keyowrd appears compared to the total number of words used in the article.
Example - Hello, My name is Mani and i’m a freelance SEO from India, I do SEO consultation to internet startups and websites.

In the above article, the keyword density is 2/17, i.e the keyword “SEO” is repeated two times in every 17 words.

Now the point is that - google bot weighs your article based on the frequency of keywords and the keyword density.So you may think - “Alright! the more the keyowrds the better the chances of getting ranked for that keyword” - Wrong!

Google’s algorithm expects and allows only certain level of keyword density, beyond which your article is easily taken as spam!

- Now how much density?

I’ve researched arond the blogsphere and the discussion forums and found that a 5 - 20% of keyword density is acceptable to Google beyond which is spam. So make sure that when you write an article, the density is well within the 20% limit.That is a healthy practice and will give you enough supplements to build your “muscles”

- Keywords in URL’s

It is a very healthy practice to use the targeted keywords in urls - but what is the optimum level of doing it.
I bet you might have seen urls like - www.freelance-seo-from-india-cheap-outsourced-services.com!
Well, that’s clearly a spam! Google only accepts maximum 2-3 hyphens in a url,beyond which, even though it may not be spam, clearly looks like one. So make sure that the url’s are not too lengthy. If your keywords are lengthy, you need not incorporate all of those into the url, cut off the unnecessary and keep the stuff.
Example - freelance-seo.com is preferred to freelance-seo-cheap-service-india.com

- Keywords in metatags

Metatags are given less importance these days, yet many play it safe and use the still, if google ignores them, there are other search engines too, they may require it?
The point here too is the same - don’t incorporate all the keywords and it’s synonyms into the description/keywords meta.Add only that is relevant, and cut off all the meaningless ones.Remember lengthy is spam!

Personally, i study that in Meta description tag - a healthy choice would be to add around 150-200 characters.
And in Meta keywords tag - a healthy choice is to keep it less than 10 keywords.

- Highlighting keywords inside the body

This is really important as it can go haywire if you don’t take it seriously.Always, DONOT use BOLD html tags to highlight keywords, instead use STRONG tags.Bots ignore BOLD tag as it is only a visibility factor while STRONG is both visibility and accessibility factor.(It can also be read by screen readers)

Always use H1, H2 and H3 tags for titles. H1 - tags should contain the most important keyword, H2 tags the lesser important ones and H3 tags the lowest important one.A good combination of all the three(also H4,H5 etc) will ensure that all your relevant keywords are read and absorbed by the bots and they know what your site is all about.One point to remember here however is that, NEVER repeat a keywords inside the same header tag or different header tags.

Example
H1 - Freelance SEO India
H2 - Freelance SEO India Cheap Services
H3 - SEO Services in India

The above is unacceptable as is forces the bot to take duplication.
Even better would be -
H1 - Freelance SEO
H2 - Cheap Service - How are we better priced?
H3 - Indian company- benefits

The common idea in all of the above methods is that, keep it short,to-the-point, and simple. Don’t make them elaborative and lengthy - that is spam!

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Comments

Anonymous on 14 June, 2007 at 4:34 am #

Hi, Added a new value add to my blog this weekend - a news widget from http://www.widgetmate.com. I always wanted to show latest news for my keywords in my sidebar. It was very easy with this widget. Just a small copy paste and it was done. Great indeed.


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