The Use of Keywords in Websites
One of the things we don't seem to have much of these days is time. Everyone rushes everywhere and communication is compressed into new shorter forms like all of the text messages I receive, and I still don't get all of those abbreviations. There is a danger that this short, fast communication is carried over into web sites that we develop. All short, bulleted points lacking any grammar or sentence construction, and as I have said before search engines seem to like well-constructed grammatical sentences.
However, there is another knock-on effect of shortening text and that is the effect it has on key words. I am not really talking about the meta tag keywords here, but the words in the text that the search engines find multiple times. That is often known as key word density i.e. what percentage of the text is taken up by a single word or multi-word phrase. Have you ever considered this in writing your own code? Have you ever thought to yourself very clever, by managing to get 100 instances of your key word in one A4 page?
Having your keywords and phrases sprinkled throughout the text is obviously good, but how can you ensure that you don't overdo it. Well, one way is to spend time creating a more lengthy piece of well-written text. This will mean that although you still have lots of key words and phrases in there, their relative density is reduced because of the greater overall volume of text.
We have a number of domains that we run purely to test theories on topics like key word density. By creating multiple pages with similar overall information, but written differently, we can test how the different search engines treat different key word densities. Just a note of warning, don't try this at home. You can actually be sandboxed (your site held in limbo) for having duplicate pages on a single domain. So being able to calculate how similar pages are to one another is important when doing this.
Finally, just a word on meta tag keywords. The importance attached by search engines to keywords specified in the meta tag has greatly reduced due to the overuse of this feature. Many sites I have looked at have tried to use the same keywords over and ever over again. Our advice is to choose these words carefully and use maybe 4 or 5, but don't go over board. Then try and use the keywords throughout the actual page text, but without forcing the density. After all, if they really are your key words, then just using them in text should come naturally.
And now our poem
Written by my partner, reflecting web page writing techniques.
If we write half a page
Then you write thirty four
I can use three keywords
whilst you get forty more
I can be brief but concise
and speedily spit pages out
but your one and only masterpiece
Carries far more clout,
I am but my comic strip
for your Tolstoyan drama
I am all wild excitement
whilst you are perfect karma,
I have few words to play with
to juggle in a subtle key
whilst you have an epic
to aid keyword density
the old bull takes his time
never rushing, always serene
he has created multiple options
whilst young bull was over keen,
so when you code the pages
don’t undersell your wording
or you'll be virtually alone
when you should be herding,
ten keywords in a thousand
dilutes the trend to oversell
and makes the reader relax
from the instinct he can tell
that a little page is but a ploy
to put him onto a sales hook,
whereas our interesting article
is worth a second look.
For those who wondered about the Poet Laureate's comments, here's the one that Philip Larkin liked, it's called Voles
I'd hate to be a sparrow, or a tortoise or a mole,
wombat or an opossum
but id love to be a vole
cos they are kind of cute
and voles have furry feet
they don’t get squashed or trodden on
or shot for humans meat
voles are kind of hip
in a rodent sort of way
so I'm going to take some time out
To be a vole today.
The Gurus Helpful Hint
Customer of the Month
Every single month we will endeavour to bring you a “Customer of the Month”, a successful site which you can visit and compare to what you may have in mind for the future yourselves.This month, it is the Dog Crates and Cages website
They provide high quality, affordable crates and cages for dogs and other pets. Besides transportation, the crates can be used as part of a puppy training regime. Woof, Bark.Can we assist your business? Just email us now with your site details and we'll have quick look and let you know what we can do for you.