When you begin optimizing your website for the search engines, or become involved in other ‘content driven’ traffic generation strategies, it’s likely that you will hear the term ‘keyword density’.

Keyword density is simply the ratio of keywords in relation to the number of words on any given page.  For the most part, you want to strive to reach a balanced density level so that search engine crawlers are given a clear understanding of what keywords are relevant to your website.  Typically, a keyword density of 2-15% will suffice.

Apart from the actual density of your content, you should also consider keyword proximity, prominence and the actual order of your keywords.

The proximity of your keywords in relation to one another is a very important aspect to search engine optimization.  The way is works is very simple:  When you enter in a search term using the major search engines like www.Google.com, you wrap the text in quotations for better accuracy in regards to the search results.

The search engines then seek out websites that have the complete keyword phrase that you entered, rather than individual keywords.

For example, if you entered in the term, “Doberman Dog Training” with quotes, it would only generate results from websites that contain the entire phrase, however without quotes, sites that only had the keyword “dog”, “training” and “doberman” would appear.

It’s important to make sure that you use complete keyword phrases, in the correct order, throughout your website content.  If you are hoping to rank for the long tail keyword phrase “scrapbook supplies at cost”, make sure you use that full length keyword term within your content, so that whenever someone enters in that exact phrase using Google or Yahoo, your website is likely to appear.

As for the actual prominence of a keyword phrase, this simply indicates the first appearance of the keyword on your webpage.  If a keyword phrase appears in the first few paragraphs (preferably first few lines) it is deemed more important than a keyword that only appears at the bottom of the page.  This means that you need to pay attention to WHERE and WHEN your keywords appear, placing keywords that are of most importance at the start of your content.

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OK, so you’re convinced that your local business has got to get a website up on the internet if you’re going to remain competitive. You realize that fewer and fewer people use the Yellow Pages every day to look for local goods and services, and that most of them now use the internet to find local businesses. And that trend is only increasing. So you’ll just hire someone to make you a website and you’ll be good to go, right?

No, it’s not quite that simple. (But it’s not hard, either – just keep reading.)  See, having a website isn’t going to help your business at all if it doesn’t show up extremely high in Google’s search results.  Anytime a person searches for something on Google, Google will return a page with the top ten websites they consider most relevant to the search term.  On the page will be a link to the next page of the second ten most relevant sites, and the third page, and the fourth, etc.

For most searches, Google will find hundreds, if not thousands of websites that have something to do with that term.  If you’re writing a research paper, or a master’s thesis, that’s great; you can keep digging through all of the links to find those hidden gems.

But guess what?  The average person who’s looking for a carpet cleaner in Kalamazoo, or a wedding photographer in Boise, isn’t going to dig through pages and pages of Google’s search results.  In fact, the vast majority of them aren’t even going to click through to page 2.  There have been many studies of this very thing, and they all show the same result: most people don’t even look at the search results past the first page.

Furthermore, when someone does a Google search for a local business, if your website isn’t on that first page of results, the odds are very high that they’re NOT going to click on your website to see what you have to offer.

Of course, this is nothing new – if you can find your Yellow Pages, look up companies under things like carpet cleaning, locksmith, plumber, etc., and see how many of them have names like ABC Plumbing, AAA Locksmith, AAAAAAA Carpet Cleaning.  Why would a company choose a horrible name like that?  Because the Yellow Pages list companies in alphabetical order, and it’s simply a fact that most people tend to call the companies who are listed at the top.   And that’s still how it is today – you need to be at the top of Google’s search results (but, thankfully, Google doesn’t care about alphabetical order) or you’re going to be ignored.

So, not only do you need a website, you MUST have a website that ranks high in Google if you’re going to dominate your competition.  Otherwise, you’re just wasting any money you spend on getting a website put up.

In order to understand the most common search engine optimization strategies, it’s important that you are familiar with the terminology associated with SEO.  Here is a quick reference guide to help you get started:

SERPS

Serps is simply an acronym that represents “Search Engine Results Pages”.  When you conduct a search in major search engines like www.Google.com, the results that are generated from your query are known as this page.

Page Rank (PR)

Page rank is an indication of the popularity and weight of specific, individual pages. It’s quite possible (and common) to have different page ranks on main and sub pages of any given site.  Page Rank (PR) can be passed onto other pages and is also factored in by backlinks to each page from relevant, authority websites and communities.

Backlinks

Search engine positioning is heavily influenced by the number of quality backlinks directing visitors to your website. Backlinks are similar to ‘votes’ in that each one represents a positive vote for your website, helping you to gain top positions within the search engines.  Backlinks reference incoming links from external sites, not links that run internally to interior pages or sub domains.

White, Black and Grey Hat SEO

White Hate SEO is focused on ethical, honest and legitimate strategies for gaining top positioning within the search engines.  Black hat SEO focuses on “gaming” the search engines, primarily by using questionable techniques and non-compliant strategies for exploiting holes in the search engine algorithms to gain rank.

Grey hat stands somewhere in between both white and black hat strategies and often encompasses both types of strategies to gain positioning in the search engines.

If optimizing your website for ongoing positioning is important to you, it’s always best to focus on legitimate, white-hat methods that will ensures the longevity of your search engine optimization efforts.

Search Engine Crawler (or Spider)

Search engines sent out electronic crawlers (otherwise known as bots) that evaluate websites by exploring content, analyzing keywords, and overall relevancy.  In order for your website to become indexed in the major search engines, it needs to be “crawled”. You can trigger the presence of a search engine spider or crawler by creating and submitting site maps that provide a blueprint of your entire website’s structure.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

LSI is a term that refers to website theming.  With theming a website, you are ensuring that relevant keywords and categories appear close to each other. For example, if your website was about ‘dog training’, both your title tags, keywords and overall content would contain the keyword ‘dog training’.  Links leaving and coming into your websit would also carry similar keywords, helping to build a consistent theme.

Keywords, Keyword Phrases, Long Tail Keywords

Keywords are what power your search engine optimization and need to be injected into both your actual content and different areas of your website pages including title and anchor text links.   Keywords used on websites are then matched to keywords manually entered into the search engines by people interested in similar content.

Long tail keywords are longer keyword phrases that consist of multiple words, such as “dog training resources” or “how to lose weight quickly”. Long tail keywords are often easier to rank for based on a lower level of competition targeting these phrases.

Website Map (Site Map)

A site map offers a clear “blueprint” of your entire website to both human visitors and search engine spiders.  Sitemaps can be automatically generated using online tools and should be submitted each time they have been updated to contain new information and links.  Sitemaps provide guidance with the navigation of your overall website, by showcasing internal links throughout the site.   Sitemaps are usually created using the XML format.

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