Content optimization overview

“CONTENT IS THE KING” this is perhaps the single most important of ranking your website highly on the search engines. While all of the factors will help get your website into the top positions, it is your content that will sell your product or service and it is your content that the search engines will be reading when they take the “snapshot” of your site and determine where it should be placed in relation to the billions of pages on the internet.

Important optimization factors:

1. Keyword Prominence, Density, Proximity and Frequency
2. Heading Tags
3. Anchor Text Link / Inline Text Links
4. Special Text (bold, colored, etc.)

Kew Concepts: Keyword Prominence, Density, Proximity and Frequency:

Prominence: Prominence is a measure of keyword importance that indicated how close a keyword is to the beginning of the analyzed areas (e.g. page title). If some word is used as the beginning of the title, headings, or close to the beginning of the visible text of the page, it is considered more important than other words. Prominence is calculated separately for each important area. HTML markup lets you emphasize certain document areas against the others. The most important items are placed on the top, and their importance is gradually reduced towards the button. Keyword prominence works much the same way. Usually, the closer a keyword to the top of a page and to the beginning of a sentence, the higher its prominence is. However, search engines also check if the keyword is present in the middle and the bottom of the page, and you should be aware of that.

Frequency – No. of times the keyword is used in the analyzed area of the pages. For example, if the keywords is “website design” and the analyzed area content is like “Provides website design and development services including flash website design, logo and corporate ID design” then keyword frequency (website design) = 2.

Keyword Weight / Density – Keyword density, or weight, is a measure of how often a keyword is found in a specific area of the web page like a title, heading, anchor name, visible text etc. against all other words, Formulae – (number of words in the keyword phrase * frequency) / total words in analyzed areas

Proximity – Keyword proximity refers to how close keywords that make up your key phrase are close to each other. For example if the keyword is “electric iron” – “International Iron Inc is selling electronic iron for 7 years. International Iron is a company that specialized in electronic devices, irons and other stuff…” You see that we try to use words “electronic” and “iron” close to each other in the text so that the spider will understand we are targeting people who see these kinds of irons.

Heading:

When using your heading tags try to follow these rules:

1. Never use the same tag twice on a single page
2. Try to concise with your wording
3. Use heading tags only when appropriate. If bold text will do then go that route
4. Don’t use CSS to mask heading tags

Try to be concise with your wording. If you have a 2 keyword phrase that you are trying to target and you make a heading that is 10 words long then your keyword phrase only makes up about 20% of the total verbiage. If you have a 4-word heading on the other hand you would then have a 50% density and increased priority given to the keyword phrase you are targeting.

Special Text

To emphasis keywords use special formatting such as bold, underline, italic or different color as needed. Search engine do recognize those keywords with special formatting.

Don’ts

Do not apply special formatting unnecessarily here & there as it looks jaggy and doesn’t make any sense. Moreover search engine may penalize for over optimization.