Internet Building Codes Blog

Today’s post is pretty straight forward.  Bigger words carry more weight.  If you place your keyword phrase in your headline in a 20-point font, that obviously tells Google that your page is really about that topic.  Same thing goes for bolded words.  Even italicizing words can help.  Don’t just go and make your whole page in 20-point Helvetica.  It’s about contrast.  If you choose to put 100 words in a 10-point font and just three words are bolded in 20 point, then you’re intentionally drawing attention to those words.  Google sees that and gives those words more weight in their ranking algorithm.

Chadd Bryant

If you’ve been working in the SEO world for very long, by now you know that Headlines are one of the first places that keywords should be used.  However, I still see a lot of webmaster who overlook the H1 and H2 tags.  These tags are attached to your headlines and subheads to draw attention to them from the search engines.  As you may recall, if you’ve been following my blog for any amount of time, I keep mentioning that Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible for everyone.  Basically they prefer information that’s organized like a doctoral thesis with a clearly identified table of contents and each chapter backs up the previous one.  Furthermore, Google likes to see individual pages that help them to quickly identify what the point of the content is.  If you have headlines and subheads that tell what the page is about, and then tell what the subsections are about, you’re helping Google to do their job.  But just adding a headline and subhead doesn’t do a lot of good, if Google doesn’t know that that’s your headline.  That’s why H1 and H2 tags are so important.  By using them, you’re essentially telling Google, when their spiders arrive at your site, that this is your headline.

One common mistake that I see all the time, is that people want to have graphic headlines, so they use an image instead of actual text.  Obviously, Google can’t read your images so they don’t even know what the page is about.  Up until recently, the same was true for Flash sites.

Until tomorrow,

Chadd Bryant

Another way to increase your keyword density without making your pages sound like they are jammed with the same keyword over and over is to utilize keyword stemming.  It’s pretty simple.  If you’re trying to optimize a page for a particular phrase, think about other words that contain that same word.  Use singular, plural, past forms, present forms etc.  Take the word “stem” for instance.  Could you use stemming, stems, stemmed, stemmification?  Well, maybe that one’s a little out there.  The point is that you have the flexibility to improve the variation in your content by using keyword stems.  Be creative and think about other ways to say things.

Getting to the stem of the problems…

Chadd Bryant

The term “keyword density” is pretty controversial.  Some web development companies believe that website pages should be written naturally and search engines will eventually find the site.  Others believe that pages should be written with calculated precision, choosing just the right number of words to include and repeating them just the right amount of times.  After considerable research, the IBCC has concluded that the later method is more effective when trying to achieve top positions on the major search engines.  In fact, keyword densities in the range of 2.5% to 5% have been consistently shown to achieve the highest rankings.

A keyword density of 5% means that for every 100 words, the same keyword phrase is repeated 5 times.  While that may seem like a lot of repeated words, you don’t have to repeat the words in the visible text that people are reading.  If you’ve been following for the past few weeks, you know by now that the keywords can be used in the title, comments, ALT tags and other places where the reader will likely never see the words, but the search engines will see them.

When developing your content, it’s a good idea to create a template that shows the title, meta keywords, description, ALT tags, headline that will use the H1 tags and the visible text.   This way, you’ll focus on the right keywords through out the page.  And you can easily count the number of times that each phrase is repeated, compared to the total number of words used.

Hope that helps.

Chadd Bryant

The ALT tag has long been used to aid the visually-impaired community as an aid for software that “reads” the page to the user.  As images are not readable by the software, ATL tags have been used as substitute.  ALT tags have offered a way for webmasters to describe their images with words so that the software for the visually-impaired can more fully read the page.  Over the years, ALT tags have also been used by more and more webmasters and SEO companies as a place to “hide” keywords.  Critics of the practice have claimed that it’s ruining the web-surfing experience for the visually impaired but the problems can extend well beyond that.  As with any area of a web site, keyword stuffing, or the practice of filling a site unaturally with keywords can adversely affect your site.  The ALT tags, since they are relatively hidden, have tempted many webmaster, as a place for stuffing keywords.  Don’t fall prey to the temptation.  As a web site development best practice, the IBCC recommends only using the ALT tags for their intended purpose while reaping the side benefit of further enhancing your site’s keyword density.  As always, avoid keyword stuffing, faddish techniques and anything that’s perceived as a black hat technique.

Chadd Bryant

As long as you’re trying to include your top keyword phrases in your pages, don’t overlook your image names.  A couple days ago we talked about naming your pages something like keyword.html, but why not think about SEO when you’re developing your images in Photoshop?

Rather than slicing up an image and naming the parts header01.jpg, header02.jpg etc, consider naming them keyword_phrase01.jpg, keyword_phrase02.jpg.  Be careful if you have more than a few images, to not use the exact same phrase or Google will lower your ranking for keyword stuffing.

Just a simple tip that’s often overlooked.

Chadd Bryant

Are meta keywords useful any longer?  They used to be one of the most important elements in an SEO program but as Google began stripping more and more power from the webmasters and began giving the ranking power to other sites, meta keywords became less and less important.

There are still some search engines that use the meta keywords to help determine the content on the page, but Google and other major search engines have eliminated them when determining where to position your site.

So should you still use meta keywords?

Many successful sites have started to eliminate them all together but meta keywords can still serve a purpose.  For what?  Well, they can still serve as a place where you can place your keywords that you’re optimizing your pages for just as a way to know which words you optimized for.  Of course, webmasters can just use comments in the code as a mental footnote, if they want to remember which keywords the page is focused on, but you may be eliminating smaller search engines from spidering your site, as long as they continue to use the meta keywords.

Just be warned, if you do use meta keywords, be sure to only include words in your meta keywords that also appear on the page itself.  Sites that use words in their meta keywords that fail to also appear in the content on the page are known to have been delisted from Google’s listings.   Underhanded webmasters who have attempted to con people into visiting their sites have found that Google is clamping down and completely banning the sites, all but eliminating their traffic supplies.  Follow SEO best practices and your site will never be in jeopardy of being de-listed.  Only those who are trying to follow faddish SEO techniques are the ones who risk losing their traffic supplies.  Since SEO best practices rarely, if ever change, when Google adjusts their ranking algorithm, the sites that provide great content and steer clear of black hat techniques are the ones who won’t experience any problems.

Chadd Bryant

If you’re trying to fill your pages with your keywords, why not use them in your meta description too?  While using them in your description may increase your page’s keyword density, the primary reason for using keywords in your description is because of the meta description’s use.

Since the description is used in Google’s search results pages (SERPs) it’s important that you mention your keywords.  If you’re looking at one of Google’s search results pages, you’ll notice that there’s a blue underlined hyperlink, then there are 2 lines of black text under it, just above the green website URL.  Those two black lines of text are very important when it comes to getting people to visit your site.  After all, being listed at the top of the Google pages won’t do your site any good if people choose to click on some other webmaster’s link.  If your site’s description is boring or doesn’t seem to be relevant to the visitor’s search, then you can bet that the other sites on the page will get the clicks.  It sure would be a shame to work hard to get your site listed high in Google’s search results, only to have people not click on the listing.

Did you know that Google puts words in bold that match the search query?  If your listing mentions the keywords that the user is searching for, then your listing will draw additional attention.  Picture yourself when you’re searching the Web with Google.  Let’s say you’re looking for “Hawaiian hotels.”  As soon as the results page comes up, your eyes begin madly scanning the page for the most relevant site.  You’re looking for anything that talks about Hawaiian hotels.  While some sites may mention things that are close, your mind is filtering things and is looking specifically for “Hawaiian hotels.”  You’re on a mission.  You’re like a blood hound that only has one thing to do.  If you see a bunch of sites that talk about “places to stay while on vacation” or “accomodations on Maui” your mind will likely skip them, in favor of the site that has the phrase “Hawaiian hotels” bolded twice.

But just filling your description with possible keywords that people will be searching for, isn’t going to get people to click on your site.  Once your listing grabs the user’s attention, you still have to convince them to click.  If your listing is boring, even if it has the right keywords in it, it will be skipped over.  Take time to write your descriptions so that they’re compelling.  Often, webmasters pay little attention to their descriptions as they are an afterthought once the page is created.  Instead, writers of the content should be considering the importance of the visible page text, title, descriptions and more.   The keywords should be embedded in each part of the page, but the content needs to still be convincing, grabbing, and engaging.

Until tomorrow…

Chadd Bryant

Perhaps one of the most important elements on your page in terms of SEO is the title tag.  If you’re using the same title on every page, you’re mission out on a huge opportunity.  You must optimize your titles too.

While webmasters don’t have as much control over the ranking of their pages as they used to, you still need to take advantage of the power you do have.  The title tag continues to be one of the top things that Google looks at when determining the quality of your on-page factors.  Sure, there are a lot of off-page factors, like links and bookmarks and domain age etc, but you have to make the most of the on-page factors over which you still have control.  The title of the page needs to be highly targeted and use your keyword phrases when ever possible.  Repeat the phrase twice if you want, but not more than that.  A great way to do this is to make a title like this:

The Presidential Election: This Tuesday, The Presidential Election Will Finally Be Over

Eliminate unnecessary words because a long title just dilutes the keyword density.  In the example above there are a few unnecessary words, but you have to have a few otherwise you’re just repeating the same phrase twice and that looks bad to Google.  Remember to focus your keywords.  If the page you’re writing is about the election, make sure that the headline, the title, the description, the meta keywords, the ALT tags, the title attribute, the comments and the content all focus exclusively on the election.  Don’t just talk about the election and then wander off-topic and start talking about the war or the economy too much.  Otherwise the page becomes diluted and appears to be less about the election itself and appears to be more about the issues that are controlling the election.  See the difference?

If you want to talk about the war, then make a page all about the war.  That page will be more likely to be found when someone searches for war-related phrases.

Hope that helps…

Chadd Bryant

You don’t just have to use your keywords in your meta keywords.  Think about your keyword phrases when you’re naming your files too.  Don’t just name your files index.html.  If you’re selling your Halloween candy that you have left over, name your file halloween_candy.html.  It doesn’t matter much if you choose to use an underscore or a dash, but include your top keywords in your file names.  And that goes for directory names too.  Think about your keyword phrases when you name them.   I see all too often directories like /about or /contact.  Why not use a name like /for_sale/halloween_candy.html?

Hope that helps you to get rid of some of the extra candy…

Chadd Bryant