Strengthening Your Website’s Relationship with Keywords
 by: Jason McElwaine


There are many companies offering Search Engine Optimization.

Put them to work, and you're bound to see improvement in your search engine rankings. But what if you can't afford to pay for SEO service? Don’t worry, because there are many things you can do yourself to make your site "search engine friendly." Here's a few:

Body Text:

Many site owners use keywords inappropriately. You visit their site and all you see everywhere is keywords repeated endlessly all over the page. This can leave a bad taste in a customer's mouth, especially if they don't realize why exactly you chose to write "dog food" 73 times in your first paragraph. In addition, you might give the search engines the idea that you're "keyword stuffing," which can get your site banned from the search engine all-together. Don't get me wrong, it is important to repeat keywords, but tastefully and strategically. As a whole, text keywords should never be more than 10% of your entire body text.

This will ensure that your keywords are listed enough to be effective for Search Engine Optimization, while at the same time keeping the search engines (and your customers) happy.

Meta Tags:

Meta tags give search engines and browsers a detailed description of your website. They describe everything from the title of your site to the language your site is using. Keywords can and should be used in Meta Tags. "Title," "Subject," "Description” and "Keywords" are specific meta tags where keywords should be used. They should only be used once in each tag, and when writing, remember that "Title," "Description" and “Subject" are often used to display your site in search engine results, so write carefully. (One quick note: Google is one of the search engines that no longer utilizes the "Keywords" Meta Tag, so be sure to use keywords in the other Meta Tags, as well as the Body, Alt and Anchor Text.)

Alt Text:

This one is easy, and it's a great way for you to list your keyword phrase all over your site, without it looking like a keyword litter box. Within every image tag, Alt Text should be present. This is the text that sometimes shows up when your mouse hovers over an image, or when a surfer chooses to browse the web without images. Search engines have no idea what images actually look like, so they read Alt Text instead. In short, including keywords in the "alt text" of images will increase keyword density throughout your page.

Anchor Text:

Anchor Text is the actual text that is displayed in a link. Many links do a poor job of describing their destination, but by using keywords in your Anchor Text, it will not only help describe your links to customers, but to search engines as well.

It's not always easy to combine targeted keywords with the title of every internal link, but using this strategy will improve keyword density throughout your page while simultaneously strengthening your site's relationship in the search engines with your targeted keyword(s).

No Script:

No Script tags are widely used to notify users when Surfing without the use of Java Script. When Java Script is employed, the message is automatically hidden by the user's browser. In addition to a standard message, a text link navigation menu using keyword Anchor Text can be included. These days, many websites use image, flash and java script links for navigation menus. This can hurt your site's ability to be indexed correctly, since search engines only recognize text links. Creating a text link navigation menu inside a No Script tag will fix this problem. It will also provide another opportunity to improve keyword density using the Anchor Text method.

Inbound Links:

Inbound links can greatly increase your website’s visibility to search engines. A search engine’s “spider” has no rhyme or reason as to where it crawls. It simply starts with the pages in its index, and follows text links endlessly around the web.

If using Keyword Anchor Text within your site is important, then the same applies for inbound links. When the spider sees your inbound URL it makes a record of the Anchor Text associated with it. Using Keyword Anchor Text in you inbound links is the #1 way to strengthen your site’s relationship with a keyword!

There are many other things you can do to make your site search engine friendly, but strategic keyword placement should be at the top of your list. Using keywords with Body Text, Meta Tags, Alt Text and Anchor Text are four easy and effective ways to optimize your site.

About The Author
Jason McElwaine is the owner of P.B. Boston Website Design located at http://www.pinbottle.com. He can be contacted at [email protected]