Keyword Phrase Page Placement - Part 4

So far, you have learned how to determine which keyword phrases you should target and how many times they should be used on each of your website's pages. Now you need to know where they should be used on your pages.

Remember, your website needs to make sense to people reading it. So only use 3 - 4 of your keyword phrases per page. The first place that group of keyword phrases needs to appear is in your page title. The title tag is html code that appears at the very top of your pages. Other tags can also be in the same area such as a description tag and keywords tag. The various information contained in those tags help the search engines quickly determine what the content on the page is about. Not all search engines use all of the information in each tag area, except for the title tag. All search engines look at that first. Each of the keyword phrases that you use on any page should appear only 1 time in each tag area. 1 time in the title, 1 time in the description, 1 time in the keywords.

*Note - Over the years, we have determined that the description and keywords tag are basically useless anymore as all the search engines are mostly ignoring them because of rampant abuse. Basically, people were using them to try and get their sites listed for phrases that had nothing to do with what was actually on the visible areas of the site pages. All the search engines now primarily use the title tag and the visible content actually on the page to determine what search phrases the page should be listed for. However, if you want to still place keyword and description tags on your pages you can do that by clicking the Page Properties button in the toolbar at the top of the page and then click the Search Engines tab on the properties page.

In the eBizWebpages.com Website Builder, there is a place at the bottom of each of your site's pages for entering page title information while you are in edit mode. There's a box for the Page Name (which appears in your site menu) and a box for the Page Title. Both should be the same and both should be your #1 top-line keyword phrase being targeted for that specific page, unless, that #1 keyword phrase is too long to be included in your site menu button. In that case, keep the targeted keyword phrase in the title and use either an abbreviation of it as the page name or another keyword phrase also being targeted on the same page. Remember, you should be targeting 3 or 4 separate phrases on each page and all should be in the title. Only 1 should be in the page name. Keep the phrases in the title separated with a - (hyphen) or a comma with a space after it (, ).

The search phrases you are targeting on each page of your site need to be distributed throughout the text content on the page. If your site page doesn't have any text or very little then you have no chance of getting the page listed. Each search phrase should generally be used anywhere from 4 - 9 times on the typical site page. If the page does not have alot of text on it, then each phrase should be included less. If the page has alot of text on it then you want to use each targeted phrase more. This is what is known as the keyword phrase density or keyword phrase ratio on the page.

All of the search engines calculate keyword density/ratio in partly determining how high the page should be ranked for the keyword phrases targeted. There is rampant speculation among the webmaster community as to what the ideal density should be. The fact is that only the search engines know and they periodically tweak whatever the ideal is to ensure that nobody is ever able to pinpoint it exactly. *Note - This is not the only thing the search engine use to figure out how high you get. There's alot more to it. Keep reading.

Our best advice is to write the content of the page any way you want it, while keeping in mind what the targeted keyword phrases for the page are. Then after you are done writing, read over what you wrote and sprinkle in the targeted phrases as much as possible wherever they reasonably make sense. They should be throughout the page. That means don't cluster them all at the beginning, or all at the end. You want them evenly distributed and at the same time the content needs to make sense. Don't just randomly put them anywhere.

Your pages have to please 2 different audiences to be the most effective. They have to please the search engine robots and they have to please the humans that will be your visitors. If you try to please the robots too much then your content will not make sense to your human visitors. If you write 100% for humans than the page likely won't get indexed very well. You want to find a balance between the 2 and the easiest way to do that is to write for the human first and then go through and strategically place the targeted keywords wherever you can as long as the overall content still makes sense.

*Note - The keyword phrase density may be one of the things you'll have to come back to and modify later if the page doesn't get listed high enough for the phrases targeted. But keep in mind, each page is targeting 3 - 4 phrases and it is highly unlikely that the page will get a top listing for all of them. If you get a top listing for 2 and a bad listing for the other 2 then you could negatively affect the top 2 trying to get the other 2 higher by modifying their density. Sometimes you have to be content with what you get and leave well enough alone.

For an excellent example of all of the above, just look at our home page. We specifically targeted 2 top-line keyword phrases, which are in the title, and several secondary phrases. See if you can figure out what they are. The 2 top-line phrases we targeted got us listed in the top 5 on all the search engines for one and top 10 for the other. We have held those same positions, give or take a few places every now and then, for almost 8 years now.

In the next part, you'll learn how to get outside help to get your site pages indexed quickly and listed as high as possible.

Click the learn why Outside Help is required and how to get it - Part 5