We all want to know how keywords affect our rankings, but to find out well need to do a little work. Many say keywords are the key to good search engine rankings, although they arent at all the only factor.
If you need a tool to help you decide on your keywords, try Overtures Search Term Suggestion Tool it allows you to test your keyword rankings by showing you statistics on recent searches for them. Its a great tool when you have no clue which keyword you should choose, as it can give you a list of terms that were recently searched on.
Keyword Density.
Keyword density refers to the number of the keywords contained within your text relative to the amount of text there is. Preferred keyword density ratios vary between search engines, but you should generally try to keep them between two and eight percent (major search engines prefer the lower end). Keyword analysis tools can help to optimize a web pages keyword density. These tools are good if youre not sure of what youre doing, as theyre very intuitive and explain things as you go.
Counting the Keywords.
Many SEO experts will tell you that the keyword density of your text isnt a very important factor, and that you should be careful not to overdo it. So is there a limit How many times should you use your keywords SEO experts wont be able to answer these questions for you, because no-ones really sure of the answer. The best answer is that it changes regularly, and you can never be sure you have to experiment to see what works for you.
Location of Keywords.
When testing the effects of keyword location, we found that pages with the keywords at the top and bottom of the page ranked higher on Google than pages with the keywords in the middle.
Many other search engines also give keywords more or less weight based on their location, but keep in mind that each search engines algorithm is different. Heres a list of how most search engines prioritize keyword positions, from most to least:
1. Domain name.
2. Page title.
3. Headings (i.e. H1, H2, etc.).
4. Body text (the first 2 to 3 KB usually counts more).
5. Meta tags (especially description).
6. Links (including keywords in the URL or link text of links to you).
7. Alt text (the alt descriptions for your pictures).
Really, though, keyword density is one of those areas where youll have trouble on your hands if you try to second guess the search engines. Be cautious.
About The Author:
Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at for more information about SEO and PRL.
You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews
There are hundreds of search engines available today, but some are far more complex than others. This article will give you an overview of how some of the most popular ones work.
Lets start with a smaller engine: InfoSeek. They only index about 200 words of your web page, so its important to make sure that you have meta tags on your site, and that the most important things are listed first. The information you put in your meta tags will be used to display a description of your site, and most meta tags can contain about 200 characters of text. The keywords meta tag, however, can have up to 1,000 characters.
These simple rules are important to keep in mind for all search engines. The more important that the information is, the closer it has to be to the beginning of your meta tags or even the beginning of your sites content. Many search engines wont even touch your meta tags so it is important that you have the same information in your body that you have in your meta tags (although you obviously cannot simply enter lists and lists of key words as this would be detrimental to your sites content).
The AltaVista search engine will send Scooter, its spider, to check out your entire site. Scooter can take as long as three months to spider and fully index your site the average spider only takes 6-8 weeks. Scooter will normally spider somewhere between two and ten pages from your site each week. This means that the longer that your web site lasts, the better it will be indexed which is in example of how search engines implement Darwins Theory into their ideology.
Excite used to be a search powerhouse, but has now been dropped as the provider of AOL and Netscape search, so its less important than it once was. The algorithm it uses to determine keyword relevance is very complicated: it indexes your pages and then attempts to summarize them by selecting only the most relevant sentences. Expect to have your pages reviewed roughly once every two weeks. Keep in mind, though, that with meta tags have no meaning to Excite when it comes to rankings, even though it will use your description tags as long as the words are relevant to your pages content.
Lets move on to Lycos. Lycos has fully integrated the Open Directory Project (ODP) into their mainstream results pages, and they also use search results from AllTheWeb. Lycos also runs click-throughs to their sister site HotBot. Lycos is one of the harder search engines to understand, as their submission pages say one thing but then they index your site in a completely different way. As a general rule of thumb, your site will be indexed in Lycos in due time as long as you get indexed in ODP and AllTheWeb.
Even though WebCrawler is owned by Excite, it still has its own search engine and indexer. If you happen to be listed with WebCrawler, you should try to stay listed with them, as it isnt the easiest search engine to get listed with. Its hit-and-miss standards combined with the sporadic indexing methods makes the submission process tough, although not impossible.
The biggest player is, of course, Google, who use a page ranking system as the central basis of their index. It was once nearly impossible to manipulate this page ranking system to drive up your rankings, but people quickly figured out that the more links they could generate to their site on the rest of the net, the better Google ranked them. Google is not thought to be using context-sensitive rankings. Context-sensitive information is used at Yahoo, Looksmart and the ODP, however, and Google regularly spiders those sites when it re-indexes its own database.
MSN is another important search engine. The holy trinity of search engines at the moment is Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These three search engines combine to provide you with the vast majority of the traffic that you will receive from search engines. MSN will generally be the first search engine to index your site and it will almost certainly list the most pages the fastest.
Although no-one can tell you exactly when you will be indexed on any search engine, its best to check back at least weekly. Whatever you do, though, dont re-submit your site more often than every two months or so you might not get indexed at all if you do this.
About The Author:
Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at for more information about SEO and PRL.
You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews