Open source training & tutorials from experienced, passionate people
By A Web Design
In Lesson 3 we created a list of keywords by studying the page content and high lighting appropriate keywords or key phrases and then entering this into an Excel spreadsheet, one keyword / key phrase on a line.
Once this brain storming session was complete the next process would be to enter these keywords / key phrases into the Google Keyword finder tool as described in lesson 4.
The Google keyword suggestion tool will in turn offer a whole lot of alternative keywords, carefully extracted from its search history that seekers are using when they wish to locate similar / identical content on the Internet. Hence, these are appropriate for use on your web page within its META keyword tag.
The Google keyword tool will also permit the exporting these keywords to a comma delimited text file that can be uploaded into Excel easily.
Download this file, save it to your desktop or in any appropriate folder on your hard disk, then upload its contents into the original Excel file from where this keyword search process was started.
This process would produce a fairly modest number of usable keywords or key phrases for a specific page such as the website's, gateway or index page.
Now from among these keywords available you will have to choose a few keywords for actual use on the web page as attributes to the <META name="keywords" content="<strong><em>keywords placed here</em></strong>" /> tag.
There is some manual work to be done before a choice can be made and appropriate keywords picked up for use. Here's what you have to do:
Diagram 1.
When the Google keyword search tool is used when looking for alternative keywords, the output provided delivers a very interesting attribute, the number of times seekers have searched for that keyword in your area of the world.
The greater the number of times people have searched for a specific keyword, the more competitive it will be to rank well for that keyword in Google. Please take a look at diagram 1 above.
Here the key phrase PHP code has been searched for 1,220,000 times. Hence, using key phrase PHP code to try and rank high in Google's search result page will be very tough.
The Google search tool ensures that you have the freshest search data to research by showing you searches for the keyword in the immediate previous month as encountered within its search engine.
Another pretty important issue is the fact that these searches are drawn from that part of the world you belong to. Hence, its easy to find out what seekers from your part of the world were using to find content similar or identical to the content on your website.
Ideally you should have about 20 keywords used on your page, although this is not cast in concrete. Having a huge number of keywords does not really help, in fact Google and other search engines will penalize you if you've simply stuffed your web page with keywords.
These 20 keywords should contain a blend of words some of which have had very many searches done on them and some of which have much few searches done on them. 50:50 is an excellent ratio.
What would make good sense is to Add a number of keywords which have a low number of searches done on them and save this to your computer as a .csv file.
Next, Add a number of keywords which have a high number of searches done on them and save this to your computer as another .csv file.
Next, upload the content of both these files into separate Excel spreadsheets. Then carefully filter out duplicates keywords from both these spreadsheets.
Finally choose about 10 keywords from the first spreadsheet and about 10 keywords from the second spreadsheet and create a single spreadsheet which will hold a blend of both keywords.
These are the keywords that you will use on your web page between its <META name="keywords" content="<strong><em>keywords placed here</em></strong>" /> tag.
When choosing your keywords from among those contained within the spreadsheet, select those keywords that closely describe the content on your web page. Since they closely represent the content available on the web page these words can be ( or already are ) sprinkled within the content of the page.
Take care to boldface the first occurrence of each keyword you've chosen within the content of the page. If required replace some of the words in the page content with the words you've chosen as keywords.
The ratio of boldface keywords to the rest of the content should be about 2% to 3% but again if this goes up or down by 1% nothing much is likely to happen. Please do remember not to stuff your page content with a ton of keywords.
A simple way to discover the ratio of keywords:page content, is to place the page content into an Editor that can deliver its word count. You can them simply calculate what 2% to 4% of this value and then ensure that the boldfaced keywords sprinkled within the content of the page are less than or equal to this number.
NOTE: Ensure that the page headline ( Page content that is contained within <h1></h1> HTML tags ) and the page title both have appropriate keywords within them. Remember that the page headline and the page title should be identical in content as well.
From the perspective of the META tag all that you can do to make your web page search engine friendly and thus rank decently in the search engine's result page has been completed.
There are a few more things that you have to do to get a really good page rank for your web page we shall take a look at these techniques in the next lesson.
Please wait...