Keyword Optimisation

Keywords are the most important factor in Search Engine ranking. Keywords are the words around which you build your web pages and web site with the hope that when people search for these words, yours is the site that they will see in the top ranking results and click on.

Competition for keyword slots

If your web site is specialised then possibly you will find your web site will gain a high ranking regardless of you putting effort into keyword optimisation. Conversely if you decide to compete headon for very popular keywords, then you may regardless of effort find your site relegated to page 3 of the Search Results. It is a well documented fact that beyond the first page or two of results you are practically invisible so far as the ordinary searching web surfer is concerned.

Niche keywords

The recommended approach to this issue, it to combine your highly desired keywords with a keyword that will still be searched on in combination with the main keywords, but which has far less competition. The logic in essence is:

"Better to be best at one thing, rather than second best at a lot of things"

By being tops for an odd competition you will at least achieve that first page of Search Results a percentage of the time.

Deciding your keywords

Once you have decided your keywords and got into the process of optimisating your web pages, it is going to be hard to alter them. Hence this process should take up some considerable time and attention.

Customer Survey

We would recommend you take the time to survey potential customers, asking them in the most general terms possible what they would enter into a Search Engine to find your product? This needs to done with a lot of care, so as not to invalidate the feedback. e.g. you need to avoid saying what would you type to find "automatic fruit juicer" unless you want those same terms echoed back at you.

Analyse the keywords

Use a tool such as Good Key Words to check out which combination of possible keywords offers both popularity as a search term and shows the least possible competitions. Also consider that you need to actually use these keywords on your site, and use them a lot! So consider whether you have selected a combination you can really use?

Optimise your site

Finally get your keywords in close proximity in all of your relevent web pages, paying special attention to title and headers and all the other optimisation tips we have provided. 

Dangerous SEO techniques

For every valid and useful technique there is to optimised your site for inclusion by Search Engines, there is a  dubious technique that may well yield great results in the short term, but breaks the Search Engines Terms and Conditions and my result in your site being downgraded or even banned by Search Engines.

If you engage an SEO service to optimise your site for you, you need to be on the alert for use of these techniques.

Keyword overload/stuffing

Overuse of your chosen keywords is one of the hardest areas to judge. You should use your keywords and lots of them, but beyond a certain point the benefit is lost and stray a little further along that road and your site can be regarded as spamming the keywords. Some sites are very blatant on this score and pages are loaded with text not intended to be read by the human audience at all.

Hidden Keywords

There are numerous ways of hiding text on a page, so that the words can only be seen by the Search Engines. The most basic of these "white on white" text is an old and easily detected trick that will certainly get your ratings slapped down. But sadly it is probably the case that you can easily stay ahead in this particular con trick. Search Engine Spiders are only so clever, no engine is currently thought to read CSS Cascading Style Sheets and no engine can understand images.

Above is an deliberately mangled example of using a background image to hide text.

Gateway/Doorway Pages

Cloaked Pages

Link Farms

Mirror Sites

Automated Submission/Rank Checking programs

To quote Google:

Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

How likely you are to be effected by breaking this rule is hard to tell. But it is worth being a little wary. We would recommend that you try trials of such products to help you understand optimised  web page construction, but if possible use test pages that are not on the domain you want Search Engines to find. The worst thing that can happen to your domain is to have it blacklisted.

You can divide the intentions of Search Engine Optimisation into rough categories which are by no means clearly delineated.

• Pages that you need to be as highly optimised as possible, and which you are prepared to modify over time to meet the whims of Search Engines.
• Pages that bulk out the site, providing extra chances for a search to find a bite on your site. Since these pages should run into the hundreds and thousands it is unlikely that you can ever manage to keep all these pages totally Search Engine Optimised.
• Mid ranking pages, pages that are important enough for you to put real effort into optimising but which comprise too much effort to revisit as Search Engine requirements change over time.

The important thing to consider is how will people locate your pages?

One strand of logic says:

"I can write two pages of reasonably optimised content in the time it takes to write one page of highly optimised content. So I get two bites at the cherry for the price of one"

This arguments falls down badly if you end up with two pages that only show up in the third page of search results, when one well optimised page could have been in the top ten results!

However you can argue this the other way! In a highly competitive field, the one highly optimised page may never rank highly for your chosen keywords, the page may only be found by a slightly off beam search, and in this case you are much better off with more pages of content.

The other point about content, is that extreme SEO techniques are time consuming and transitory, whereas content accumilates. Each good page of content you add now will still be useful in a years times, or even 5 years time.

One of the borderline considerations in Search Engine Optimisation is the link title tag.

This tag takes the form:

<a href=http://www.marsjupiter.com title="Mars Jupiter Home Page">

the tag has a two fold purpose:

• It can be converted to speech in web browsers designed with disabled access in mind.
• If added as a bookmark, the title can be made the bookmark title.

These factors should make you consider the use of title tags as part of a well designed page. But how do they count to wards Search Engine Optimisation?

The current wisdom is that Google takes no account of these tags and other Search Engines put very little weight on them.

At marsJupiter.com we also wonder if these tags could be dangerous when used in conjunction with other SEO techniques. Search Engines do try and filter out blatant attempts to "spam" them with pages overloaded with keywords etc. We seriously wonder if use of heavily loaded title tags might just tip the balance and start getting pages actually penalised?