Creating Search Engine Friendly Content to Power Your Rankings

One of the most important aspects of ranking highly on a search engine is whether a Web site provides a content rich experience for visitors (both human and and search engine spiders.) The following article explains some steps you can take to ensure that your Web site content encourages high search engine rankings.

Discovering your keyword phrases

Discovering appropriate ‘keyword phrases’ appropriate to the subject matter covered by your Web site is critical for search engine ranking success. If your site does not contain the phrases that people are using to discover the sort of information found on your site, then your site may not appear in the search engine results.

Finding the keyword phrases for your pages and site

1. The first task is to brainstorm your business and come up with a rough list of possible phrases and keywords. Add these phrases to a spreadsheet.
2. One of Google Labs’ tools is known as Google Sets. The tool creates sets of things based on a few examples. For example, if you entered the terms: graphic design, web design and marketing, and press the button for small set, you would get the following items: graphic design, marketing, web design, advertising, photography, web development, public relations, multimedia, web hosting, flash, logo design, design, website design, printing and ecommerce. The tool gives you the option to ‘grow’ the list to find additional items. After using Google Sets, add appropriate additional phrases to the spreadsheet.
3. Another potentially useful tool is KwMap. The tool is designed to help you find new keyword phrases and, according to the Web site, it does this by using a database of keyword inter-relations. To use the tool, you enter a keyword phrase and KwMap will display a keyword chart. It contains two lists. One contains your initial keyword phrase, the other contains phrases that are different, but similar. Potentially useful keyword phrases should be added to the spreadsheet.
4. Google AdWords provides another keyword tool. The tool has two options for generating keyword phrases. The first lets you enter several keyword phrases, for example, you could use the ones that you discovered in step 1 above. The second lets you enter a URL for a Web site. On selecting ‘use synonyms’ and pressing the ‘get keyword ideas’ button, the system then creates a list of keywords and keyword phrases. Once you have generated a new list of words, copy and paste them into the spreadsheet.
5. Do competitive research by analyzing competitive Web sites to see what keyword phrases they are using in their META tags and title tags. These tags are part of the HTML for a page and can be found by opening a competitor site in a browser and clicking View-Page Source in Firefox or View-Source in Explorer. The title and META tags should be close to the top of the page. Add any new keyword phrases to the spreadsheet list.
6. Wordtracker provides a keyword service, available by subscription, to enable you to get some insight into what people are searching for. According to Wordtracker’s Web site, they compile a database from the Dogpile and MetaCrawler meta engines. You can research additional appropriate keywords and import your lists to find how many searches are being made for the specific phrases. The tool can automatically add plural forms of words and add additional terms to keyword phrases. Wordtracker tells you the number of searches for a specific phrase. While this information is useful, if a search term is searched for frequently but is very competitive (i.e. there are a lot of Web sites that show up in the search results when this phrase is searched), then you are less likely to rank well for that phrase. In addition to reporting the number of searches, Wordtracker also provides data on the number of searches divided by the number of sites that appear in search results for the term. The higher this number, the more likely you are to rank well for the phrase.
7. A similar tool to Wordtracker is KeyWordDiscovery (http://keyworddiscovery.com). This service is available by subscription and claims to collect data from over 200 search engines.
8. When you are satisfied that you have a comprehensive list of keyword phrases, copy the list and paste it back into the Google AdWords keyword tool, this time using the ‘descriptive words or phrases’ option. Press the ‘Get keyword ideas’ button and select exact match. Export the keywords using the CSV option and open in a spreadsheet.
9. You now have a fairly comprehensive list of keywords and approximate numbers of searches made.
10. There is a further step that will help confirm the value of the keyword phrases that you have defined. The Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) attempts to do this by dividing the square of the number of searches for a keyword phrases by the number of pages on the Internet that contain an exact match of the phrase in question and multiplying the result by 1000. So the ideal keyword phrase is one that has a large number of searches, but only a small number of pages containing the phrase that ‘compete’ with your page. Details of this technique may be found at http://1stsearchranking.net/keywords.htm.

Appropriate inclusion of keyword phrases

Having made a list of keyword phrases, the next stage is to include them in the pages on your site.

It is actually worth including the phrase several times, so long as this is done in a ‘natural’ way. If your page truly contains information about a particular phrase, then it follows that the phrase would be included many times. But gratuitously repeating a phrase over and over so that the text sounds stilted could result in a search engine assuming that it is being ‘spammed’ and potentially reducing your ranking.

Title tags

Every page should have a title tag. This appears in the HTML as follows: < title >Billy Fire LLC | Web site updates and hosting< /title > Once a page is displayed in a Web browser (e.g. Firefox or Microsoft Explorer) the title is displayed in the top bar of the browser window.

Because of the position the title tag has in the hierarchy of information, it is a very important place in which to place keywords or keyword phrases. Similarly, h1, h2, h3 etc tags are of importance because search engines assume that text placed into an h1 tag carries more importance than text place into an h2 tag and so on. This information is used by the engines to determine the relative weighting of information on the page.

In the same way, emboldening (i.e. using the Bold words or Bold words tags) indicate to a search engine that that word or phrase is relatively important compared to those around it..

Using the ALT property for image tags

Every image on a Web page is placed using an “img” tag, e.g. < img alt="Are you ready for business? Keep your Web site up to date." src="images/banner1.jpg" />

The ALT property displays text on the Web page if the image file (in this case images/banner1.jpg) is not available. It displays on some browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 6) as you hover over the image with your mouse. It is also useful for visually impaired visitors who can use a screen reader to describe what they cannot see.

For all these reasons it is important that the ‘alt’ property is accurate and that it includes keywords. It should be no more than about 10 words and should accurately describe the image. It should not contain a list of hundreds of keywords as the engines may regard this as keyword ‘stuffing.’

Page names

In addition to using title, h1, h2 and h3 tags to your advantage, search engines also use the name of the file when determining ranking. For example, a page that describes a managed hosting service, could be named: administered-Web-hosting.php. Notice how the individual words are separated by dashes. This helps the engine parse the individual words.

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Martyn R. Whittaker
Billy Fire LLC

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