Once you’ve figured out what words your customers are using at the search engines, you need to use those words frequently on your site and in the right places - both within your copy and within your HTML code (HTML meta tags). This is a big part of what is known as optimizing
your website for search engines. There are also some site structure - or information
architecture - and web design considerations (discussed below).
TIP: When you optimize your website for a particular word, you’re essentially telling the search engines to include you in the results when people search for that word.
(How high up the rankings you appear depends largely on the number of links back to your site there are.)


Optimizing your web copy
The trick to optimizing your copy is using the most important keywords frequently and in the right places without compromising the readability of your copy. But how do you define
“frequently”? And what are the right places? What if you want to target a few different
keywords? And for that matter, what should the wordcount of my pages be? Below are a few tips which will help you out.

What should the wordcount of my pages be?
You’ll hear a lot about the importance of a lot of content. While I definitely agree that ‘content
is king’, there is no need to write volumes. You can reach the top of the search engines with a
page wordcount of between 100-1000. Below 100 is probably too little for the search engines.
Above 1000 is definitely too much for your visitors. Certainly don’t be intimidated into writing
pages and pages of copy for your home page (or any other page where short, succinct copy is
required).

How many times should I use a keyword?

You don’t want to fill every page up with every keyword you’re targeting. This simply dilutes
your site’s relevance and reduces readability. Search engines and visitors alike will object; the search engines will see your site as spam, and visitors to your site will find it hard to read (if not meaningless).

A good rule of thumb is to aim for a site-wide average keyword density of around 2%
(measured using LiveKeywordAnalysis - http://www.live-keyword-analysis.com). Density is a measure of frequency in relation to the total wordcount of the page. So if your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 10 times, its density is 5%.

When you actually try to do this, you’ll see that 2% isn’t easy to achieve. The easiest way to
do it is to be specific. As you write every sentence, ask yourself, “Could I be more specific?”
For example, don’t just say “our computers” or “our products”; ask yourself if you can get
away with saying “our cheap second hand computers”. Similarly, don’t say things like “with our help”; instead, say “with the help of our cheap second hand computers”. Once you get the
hang of it, you’ll find there are more than enough opportunities to replace a generic term with your keyword phrase.

Obviously, there’s a bit of an art to it. Sometimes it ends up just sounding like you’re
repeating your keyword phrase over and over again. If this happens, you may just need to restructure the sentence or paragraph. Remember, your site reflects the quality of your
product or service. If your site is hard to read, people will infer a lot about your offering… Readability is all-important to visitors. And after all, it’s the visitors who buy your product or service, not the search engines.
NOTE: You don’t need to be paranoid about density. You can have some pages which have a high density, and some which have a low density.

What if I want to target more than one keyword?
It’s best to only target one keyword per page. If you try to target more, your keywords will be competing against each other, diluting each other’s impact. If you need to target more than one keyword, simply create a page for each.
For example, divide your Second Hand Computers site into separate pages for Macs and PCs, and then segment again into Notebooks, Desktops, etc. This way, you’ll be able to incorporate very specific keyword phrases into your copy (e.g. For your Macs page, focus on “cheap
second hand macs”. For the PCs page, focus on “cheap second hand pcs”, etc.)

(See ‘Link paths’ on p.22 for information on using text links between these pages.)

Where should I use my keywords?
When assessing what your website is about, search engines pay close attention to the words
you use in your text links and headings. So make sure your links and headings are keyword
rich.



Using keywords in links
When you link from one page to another, try to use your target keyword as the link text (the part that’s normally blue and underlined). For example, on your “Cheap Second Hand Macs” page, you could include a text link to “Cheap Second Hand PCs”.


Using keywords in headings
Just as customers rely on headings to scan your site, so to do search engines. This means
headings play a big part in how the search engines will index your site. Try to include your
keyword phrase in your headings. In fact, think about inserting extra headings just for this
purpose. Generally this will also help the readability of the site because it will help customers
scan read.


Using keywords at the start of the page
Many SEO experts believe that the search engines see words at the start of a page as more representative of what your site is about than words at the end (i.e. prominence). So it’s a good idea to make sure you use your keywords toward the start of each page.


Optimizing your HTML code

Within the HTML code behind your page, there are things call ‘meta tags’. These are short
notes within the header of the code which describe some aspects of your page to the search engines. Although there is some debate over how important meta tags are when it comes to SEO, it’s generally agreed that they shouldn’t be ignored.
Whether you’re building your website yourself, or you’re getting a web designer to do it, it’s a
good idea to understand the basics


Optimizing your site structure

When structuring the information on your website, there are two main aspects you need to
consider:

•    Multiple keywords

•    Link paths

•    Site map

Multiple keywords
It’s good practice to structure your site around the keywords you want to target (i.e. create a separate page for each keyword).


Link paths
For search engine spiders, text links are like doorways from page to page and site to site. This
means websites are generally better indexed by search engines if their spiders can traverse
the entire site using text links. If your site is simple, you can simply link each page to every
other page using text links at the bottom of the page. But if your site is complex, this is
impractical. Instead, you’ll need to create a hierarchical structure and link top to bottom and
left to right using text links (assuming this doesn’t detract from the usability of your site).


Optimizing your web construction
Search engine spiders and robots don’t see websites the way you and I do. They require your site to be designed a particular way. If you don’t observe a few rules of thumb, you can
severely hamper your search engine presence.