The Google AdSense Handbook
Making money by adding Google AdSense ads to your websites
SEO—Search Engine Optimization
You’ve probably heard of SEO, since it’s very hot right now. It stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a site by designing the site content so that the site ranks high in the search results of a search engine.
The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that a user will visit that site. Let’s face it, most people are lazy. They’re not going to spend time clicking and scanning tons of pages of search results. Therefore, where a site ranks in a web search is absolutely critical for directing more traffic toward the site. SEO helps to make sure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.
To understand how this works, you need to know a little bit about how search engines work. Typically, a search engine sends out a spider to fetch as many documents as it can. Then another program, called an indexer, reads these documents and makes an index based on the words each document contains. Each search engine uses a unique proprietary algorithm to create indexes so that hopefully only meaningful results are returned for each query. These indexers compute the keyword density.
Keyword density refers to the how often a certain word appears in a given document. It’s given as a percentage. Let’s say you have a site about running shoes. A keyword density of 7% on “running” on that web page means that out of 1000 words, 70 of them are “running.”
Unfortunately, the quick-buck con artists have figured this out, and they will put up a site that has a front page that is totally littered with keywords. To give you an idea, a normal key word density for the main key words is about 3 to 7%. What these people will do is have something insane like a 25% keyword density on their front page. Then that page ranks #1 in search engine results when users search for that word. Once the user is on the entry page, they’re likely to enter the site. Pornographers do this by putting up sites that have content like:
Sex, sex, sex. Sex is here. You want sex. We have
sex. Pix of sex, lots of sex.
See how annoying that gets? Search engines used to use meta-tags to search for web sites. This was nice, since the meta-tag was a hidden area of your page where you could put all the relevant keywords and not have to worry about making your content sound awkward by overusing certain words.
Things to Consider
There are many things to consider when you go to put keywords in the text of your pages. Most search engines index the full text of each page, so you should put your keywords throughout your text. However, each search engine uses different ranking algorithms. And that’s the really hard part--difficult though it may be, you need to keep all of them in mind.
General rules
Your main page should be full of keywords because that page has a higher chance of being indexed than other pages. And for some search engines, it will be the only page that is indexed.
Some engines will rank your page highly if it has at least 100 words on it, so consider that your minimum. Directories include pages based on the quality of their content, so make sure your pages aren't just lists of keywords. If you do that, you risk not getting in the big directories AND you will irritate readers—they won’t come back.
Important design concepts
When you create your pages' content, pay attention to:
• Keyword prominence
• Proximity
• Density
• Frequency
The thing about keyword prominence is that the best place to place keywords in your text is at the top of each page, preferably the main page. The closer your keywords appear to the start of the page or the start of a sentence, the better. You'll frequently see “keyword prominence”
used to describe search engines' algorithms. Be aware that some engines also say the bottom of the page should contain keywords as well.
It gets more complicated.
Search engines view pages differently than people do. Here's an example:
Chrome. We’re all about chrome. Chrome bumpers,
chrome trinkets, we love chrome.
Now, you may think you did pretty good by putting your keyword, which was obviously “chrome”, at the top of your page. A search engine, however, sees your page this way:
Home | About Us | Products | Contact |
Chrome We’re all about chrome Chrome bumpers chrome trinkets we love chrome
Now your keyword placement doesn't look nearly as good as it did before, does it? So the moral of the story is:
try to put keyword-rich text at the very top of your page. If you put images at the top of your page, make sure to include ALT tags so the search engine ignores them.
Now, about keyword proximity. Some engines, such as Google, use keyword proximity as part of their ranking formulas. So what’s it mean? Keyword proximity refers to how close keywords are to each other. You want to put your keywords as close together as possible and make sure your sentences are clear.
Here's an example:
Meow Mix sells the very best cat food as far as taste
tests of actual cats are concerned.
versus
Meow Mix scored number one in taste tests to see
what kind of food is really preferred by the typical cat.
The two keywords are "cat" and "food." If a user searches for "cat food," the first sentence will rank higher because its keywords are closer to each other. Why do search engines do this? Because if you’re searching for “running shoes”, a page that contains “running shoes” is probably relevant, but a page that contains, “I was running late for work and forgot to put on my good shoes,” probably is not.
Why is keyword density important?
Because, as I said earlier, it measures how often that particular word comes up. Keyword density is also known as keyword weight. The higher the percentage of keywords in relationship to other text, the higher your page will rank—to point. Many search engines, Google included, have gotten wise to the fact that extremely high keyword densities are probably contrived. Here's an example of how keyword density it measured. Let's assume the keyword phrase is "cat food."
Cat food is our only business. Since "is", "our," and other stop words are usually not counted, there are three "words" in the sentence:
"puppy food," (which the search engine counts as one word, since that’s what it’s searching for), "only," and "business." "Cat food" composes 1/3 of the sentence, or 33%. Realistically, keyword density is almost never this high, nor should it be or your copy will sound very contrived. The recommended density is 3-7%. This means that your keyword should repeat 3-7 times for every 100 words.
Sure, that may not sound hard, but believe me--having 10 keywords and trying to repeat each one 3-7 times per 100 words of text is practically impossible. Instead of trying to do that (and having copy that sounds really weird), pick two or three of your most important keywords and try to use them 3-7 times for every 100 words.
So what about keyword frequency?
Keyword frequency is a measure of the number of times keywords occur within a page's text. It's kind of related to the concept of keyword density. The thinking is that search engines want to see a word used more than once to make sure it’s something you’re really talking about. The best number of times to repeat a key word is 3-7 times.
Don't get overly clever and try to use tiny or invisible text to put keywords at the beginning of your pages. Search engines look for this, and when they find it they call it spam and they’ll probably reject your site for it. So, in a nutshell, you want to:
• Include at least 100 words in page text
• Use keywords at the beginning of the page
• Place keywords close to each other
• Repeat keywords 3-7 times for every 100 words
Likes and dislikes of Googlebots
What’s a Googlebot? It’s one of the little web-searching spiders (automated) that I talked about in the last section. And these spiders have definite preferences, so you want to make sure your content is good spider food.
Spiders like:
• Neat code—less lines of code than lines of text (or more lines of text than lines of codes.)
• Normal keyword densities of 3-7%.
• Lots of backlinks on pages that link back to your home page. (Top sites have an average of 300 backlinks.)
• Original content not found anywhere else.
• Quick downloads of sites, which means not a lot of dynamic URLS to other sites.
• Site maps.
• ALT Tabs for images.
• Link partners who are contextually relevant to your page (i.e., if your page is about buying real estate, links might about be how to get loans, how to prospect for deals, how to start a corporation…but not about pet gerbils, latest fashions, or cell phones.)
• New content every time the spider comes to check up on your site.
Spiders do not like:
• More lines of code than text.
• Nested tables.
• Super-high keyword densities, which they call “keyword stuffing”.
• “Doorway pages” that act as a portal and which just happen to have super-high keyword densities.
• Too many backlinks to your home page from within your domain.
• Duplicate content from another site—regardless of who stole what from whom.
• Lots of dynamic URLs that cause a site to take forever to download.
• Repeating the exact same words in your linking text, which the spider will interpret as automated link swapping. (Interestingly, it’s fine for the spiders to be fully automated, but they hate it when we do that!)
• Stale content that never changes.
About Specific Keyword Density Ranges
With the decline of meta-tags, keyword density ranges have become very important. They’ve also become very controversial. Here’s the thing: you want a high enough keyword density—at least 7%--that your keywords rank highly in the bigger search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, DogPile, and HotBot.
But, as we discussed, you don’t want your keyword densities so high that they turn your content into over-hyped gobbledygook, nor do you want to raise a red flag when the spiders come crawling over your content. If your keyword density is 20% or more, the search engine will most likely red-flag you for “keyword stuffing” and penalize you by moving you down in the search results.
Thus, keyword density ranges are controversial. To make things worse, different search engines have different algorithms. One of them might thing an SEO keyword density of 18% is fine, another may not.
The only way a search engine can figure out just what your page is about is to search for the keywords you use. Those keywords don't necessarily have to be right there on the page—they can be in the title and in links that will lead to the page. Having said that, though, keywords that appear on your page are certainly the most common way that search engines use to decide what your page is all about. Keyword density refers to the ratio of keywords to the total number of words on the page.
Now I want you to look again at the paragraph above. There are 95 words total, and I used the word "keywords" exactly five times. The keyword ratio for the paragraph, then, is 5 divided by 95 times 100, or about 5.26%. Easy math, correct? You bet. But how much does that stuff matter?
Well, it’s not a matter of life and death, but it’s pretty important. You see, when a search engine compares two pages to figure out which one ought to rank higher, keyword density will factor into it—usually pretty significantly. In fact, all other factors being equal (which is pretty much impossible, but let's pretend), the page with the higher keyword density will generally rank higher.
However, simple as Keyword Density is, it can also get really complex in a hurry. Do plurals or other stemmed variations of your keyword count as keywords? Should stop words, which are those common words you see all the time like "a" or "the," be ignored when calculating density?
Should you include off-page content, like meta tags and titles, in your calculations? What about keyword frequency or keyword proximity or keyword prominence?
And like I’ve said before, bear in mind that if your keyword density gets too high, search engines just might realize it and penalize your page. But now, hold on. Even though keyword densities are getting to be a complex science with lots of complicated algorithms, you can do it!
Keyword densities really are not rocket science, so don’t fall into the trap of making things more complicated than they need to be. Go to Google and search on "keyword density." The first three pages should be ones that provide about 20 or 25 different tools for calculating KWD.
Now all you have to do is pick one that feels user-friendly to you and use it to optimize your web page, noting the results. Now try something else: run a Google search on your keyword, and run the analysis on the first ten sites. Take a good hard look at the results. From this, you should get a good idea how your page will compare with the ten top ranking pages in Google, at least in terms of keyword density.
Here’s the thing that frustrates people, though: if you go and do that with three or four different KWD tools, you will no doubt come up with different numbers, but the graph of those numbers will look very similar. Don’t worry about it, because the numbers aren’t the most important thing. You only care how they compare to each other. Something else you'll probably discover is that keyword density is not a very good indicator of rank. The top ranking page may have a much lower density than the page at number ten, for example.
Why does this happen, when you work so hard to get your keyword density high? It happens because KWD is only one factor among many. It's important to a good ranking, but it's not the be-all and end-all of a good ranking. What you really want to know from your analysis is the range of density values that rank well. Chances are good that if your page is below that range, getting on page one to compete with the big dogs will be tough, and if you're above that range, the search engines may think you’re “keyword stuffing” and you’ll be penalized. Just remember, though, the numbers are guidelines you should know, not carved-in-stone rules that forever define your fate. Experiment!
You may hear self-proclaimed website gurus say that keyword density should always run between two and eight percent or whatever the current numbers being quoted in forums across the Internet happen to be. That’s partly true. Those numbers are probably fairly accurate for most keywords. They’re based on averages and it’s always good to stick close to an average.
But there’s a problem.
Here’s how the problem goes: the most commonly used letter in English is the letter “E.” If you wrote a ten word sentence, it would be much easier to use the letter E five times in that sentence than it would be to use, say, the letter Z five times. Letters aren’t an even distribution. Neither are keyword. Big shock, huh?
Remember what I said earlier about not sounding awkward in your content? Well, the biggest thing about keyword density is that it must read well and sound very natural to a user. It’s useless to get a page one ranking if your content is very lame. Like the letter E, some keywords are easy to use a lot of while still sounding natural. For instance, if your keyword was “grass” on a site about lawn care, it wouldn’t be hard to use “grass” a lot.
But some keywords just don’t lend themselves to being used a lot—like “quince.” (It’s a type of fruit.) Here’s the choice to be made: you can use an average range, which will work well most times, or you can spend time analyzing the top ten pages to find the best range for that particular keyword and be sure you're not trying to optimize for a Z or a quince.
Frustrated? Don’t be! It isn’t that hard. If you’re still confused, check out a competitor's page in Google's cache (which highlights the keywords for you) to get a good visual feel for density. Another good tip is to perform a “real person sanity check” on your content. Reading your optimized content out loud several times, and try to get a natural flow that will make the copy draw users who will come back. Then take a hard look at your content. If you can substitute a keyword for a pronoun without loosing your flow, do it.
For instance, if your keyword is “hammock”, instead of a sentence saying, “I love to lie in it,” say, “I love to lie in my hammock.”
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