Optimizing Your Web Site For Search Engine Spiders

He Who Has the Least Keywords Wins

If you have a list of 20 phrases that you want your site to be first for, forget about it. It is almost a mathematical impossibility for that to happen--you would ultimately end up getting a poor rating for everything. It's best to narrow it down to a few words and phrases that your site relates to.

Before you choose your phrases, think of your audience. Don't think of what your site is about, think of who your potential audience is, and what they would be searching for. Also, it is much easier if you choose phrases which don't already have a lot of sites competing; try searching for the phrases and seeing how many total results Google reports, as well as the PageRank of the top sites (using the Google toolbar).

Now, think of which keywords are most likely to appear in the same search phrase. For example, "used" and "cars" will probably show up together a lot. Make a note of these.

The Different Types of Tags

Here's the main things that search engines look at on your page:

• The Title - The <title> tag is given huge weight in most search engines. It should be short, though--ideally only a phrase or two.
• Meta Tags - I won't go into detail here, but some search engines give varying amounts of weight to the meta tags (Google ignores them, though).
• Regular Text - Equally important as everything else is the regular text of your pages. You should have frequent references to all of your target words and phrases.
• Formatting - Some people believe that more weight is given to words in bold or italics. Although this may be true on some engines, the small effect that it may produce is not worth the unprofessionalism in your site's appearance.
• Header Tags - Tags like <h1> and <h2> are given more weight by some engines. You shouldn't just use these for search engines, though; from a usability perspective (for example, disabled persons using screen readers) it is much better. Use CSS to change the appearance of header tags.
• Links - Some search engines give more weight to the text of links. Don't waist this space with "click here." A link's text should always be representative of the content that it points to. Once again, this also has usability benefits.
• Alt Tags - In image tags, the "alt" attribute is a favorite place to include text that is invisible to users, but that search engines still consider. Nevertheless, don't pack it full of keywords--your site will be considered spam. It's ideal to have a few short phrases in the alt tag (not all of which need to be your target words or phrases).
• URLs - Some search engines are believed to give some weight to words in the URL. This includes the domain, directories, and the page's filename. You might as well optimize these to have your target phrases in them.

What Engines are Looking For

Position on the Page

Words at the top of the page are given more weight than words at the bottom. This may seem simple, but search engines "see" pages differently. Many webmasters have navigation bars on the left of their pages. They see something like this:

It would seem that "text about our company here" is at the top of the page, but it isn't. The engine sees:

Home Inventory Contact Text about the company here.

So, of every word on the page, "home" is given the most weight. That's probably not what you want, but you can still have your menus on the left.

Rather than rearranging all of your pages, try using words for your links that reflect the keywords relevant to the page being linked to, as well as to the page linking to it. Instead of "Home," try "The PC Store." This will also have an added benefit on Google, which puts a lot of importance on the text being used to link to a given page.

In addition, consider using images instead of text on your navigation bar. This will make your body text the top of the page. For even better results, use alt tags for the images on your navigation bar that contain (among other things) your target words and phrases.

How Words Relate to Each Other

If you consistently place words close to each other, many search engines will notice it. For example, if you almost always have "online" and "games" in the same sentence (or, even better, the same phrase), then you will get a higher ranking under searches for "online games."

This is why it's important to consider the phrases that potential customers would use when searching.

How Often Words Occur

Obviously, search engines consider how often a given word occurs on your page. They look at it with both a raw count, and a percentage. For the percentage, common words like "a" or "the" aren't counted.

As a general rule, try to use each of your target words about five times (give or take a few) for every 100 to 150 words of text.

Example

Suppose that we're writing the home page text for an online shoe store. It's the text at the top of the page, so it's highly-weighted by search engines. From a previous article, the keyword phrases chosen were:

• shoes
• discount shoes
• cheap shoes
• shoes free shipping
• discount shoes free shipping
• sandals
• athletic shoes
• sandals free shipping
• discount athletic shoes
• footwear
• shoes online
• (and all combinations thereof)

Since we can't focus on all of those, we need to choose a few to include the most--these will be our "primary" words. The remainder will be "secondary" words. Now we're talking about individual words, not phrases.

The best strategy is to consider the search phrases that our potential customers might use. Words that are in most searches should be primary words, and words that are "modifiers" should be secondary.

Primary: shoes, footwear, discount
Secondary: free shipping, affordable, sandals, athletic, online, etc.

Obviously "shoes" is a primary word. We also would expect "discount" to show up frequently, as well as "footwear." All other words are secondary words.

Now we can write the text. The trick is to use the primary words throughout--there should be approximately one primary word for every 15 to 25 words in the text. Basically, for every two sentences you need to use all of your primary words once. Then, put in your secondary words, but keep them as close as possible to the primary words. Here is a few sentences as an example:

Welcome to Shoes online! We are a growing online storefront that carries a variety of footwear at discount prices. Whether you're looking for athletic shoes, sandals, or just street shoes, out large inventory is sure to meet your needs. With free shipping on all shoes and friendly customer service, shopping for affordable footwear has never been so easy.

Conclusion

This should be a good start to writing text that search engines rank favorably.

However, resist the temptation to have blocks of text at the bottom of your pages in a 2-point font containing nothing but keywords. Search engines are smart enough to not count that, and many will go so far as to ban your pages from their index. When optimizing your site's text, play fair.

Good luck!