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Tutorials > Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) > Search Engine Optimisation - What is all the fuss about? Part 2 - Keywords



Search Engine Optimisation - What is all the fuss about? Part 2 - Keywords

Keywords are one of the single biggest contributing factors to your websites ‘relevance’ – keywords are vital. Keywords come in many forms and are not just located in the content of your site. They are located in the titles, image tags, images names, alt tags and content areas amongst others.

Keyword competition is also important so you need to research what keywords have a lot of high ranking results already and steer away to keywords that have less competition to improve your hit rates.

  1. Naming Pictures – If the image is an ADSL modem, name the image adsl-modem.jpg instead of just DSC00444.jpg.
  2. Page Title – this should match your major keyword for your page with a short description as well, this reinforces what this page is about. This description will appear in search results as well, so keep it relevant and interesting for users to read
  3. Don’t use javascript for referring links, menus etc within your site, search engines don’t like it, use static links
  4. If you are building a dynamic website, make sure you have appropriate page names. If you were selling tools on your website and you want to sell spanners, your page should be http://www.somedomain.com/products/spanners/ and not /products/4531/ - it starts becoming obviously what is important! Your products ID may be 4531 but that doesn’t help Google. Rather use relevant keywords/names.
  5. Images should have ALT and TITLE attributes. Your code should look like: ’Spanner instead of
  6. Text near the image should be similar to the image name.
  7. Image Names – use hyphens or underscores in image names – it makes it easier for search engines to identify keywords
  8. Don’t SPAM – Keep keywords and descriptions should and concise in title and alt tags. 2-4 words in length maximum, don’t overdo it otherwise the search engines may penalize you.
  9. Contents – Do not overdo keywords in your content, keep it relevant. If you repeat the same word many times over you will get penalized.
  10. Anchor Text – see section below
  11. Headings - <h1><h2><h3> tags are headings, use stylesheets to change what they look like, but put your keywords / descriptions in there
  12. Bold – bold text in <strong> is emphasized. Don’t use it as your first word in a the first paragraph though.

Search engines are extremely wise to people trying ‘black hat’ techniques to get their websites up the rankings. Be careful, if you load a website with too many of the same keyword, you will be penalized. The best method is to keep the content as interesting as possible to a READER.

Search engines will pay more attention to a page that is optimized well with appropriate keywords than a page that overdo’s the optimization or a page that doesn’t have any.

KEEP IT RELEVANT!



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