• Lesson Index:
• Overview
• Basic
• Google Toolbar and PR
• Alt and Title
• Funny Names
• Google Dance
• Googlebot
• Google Sandbox
• Trust Rank
• AdSense
• Google Ads
• Google Search
• AdSense for Content
• Earning Reports
• Channels
• Policies
• Filter Ads
• Promotion
• Keyword Optimization
• Information Rich Pages
• Link Exchanges
• No Tricks
• No Spam
• Web Forums
• Web Directories
• Other Ways
• Checking Up

Keyword Optimization

So now that you have a website built, and have content on your site, and have placed Google ads on your pages, you want your page to be found by search engines.

Search engines searches by keyword phrases. Taking a concrete example, suppose that you have a cooking site and you have a page about cooking chestnuts. Users who wants to find out how to cook chestnets will often type in "cooking chestnuts" in the search engine field and get a search engine results page (or SERP). You want your page to be listed high up on the results by optimizing your particular page for the keyword phrase "cooking chestnuts". Note that we optimize each page of the site individually. So for one page, you will optimize for the keyword phrase "cooking chestnuts". For another page on you cooking site, you will optimize for say "types of oils".

Which Keyword Phases to Optimize For

On one topic, there can be several possibilities of keyword phrase that you can optimize for. For example, you can optimize of "cooking chestnuts" or "roasting chestnuts". Which phrase should you optimize for?

To help with your selection, you will want to know how often people search for each phrase. You can find this "search volume" with either the Adwords Keyword Tool by Google or the Keyword Selector Tool by Overture. Google's tool will tell you both the search volume as well as the amount of advertiser competition. As an AdSense publisher, you want a keyword phrases that has high search volume as well as a high advertiser competition. Google's tool only shows you a bar instead of numbers. So if have two phases that have the same "bar", you can then use Overture's tools to give you some qualitative numbers.

You can learn more about the Adwords Keyword Tool on ProBlogger.net.

Title Tag

To optimize the page for "cooking chestnuts", you would put "Cooking Chestnuts" as the title of the page. As in ...

<title>Cooking Chestnuts</title>

The title tag is actually quite important. A good idea for the title is to put the site name followed by a slogan containing the keywords that they want to optimize for. For example, the following is a good title tag...

<title>WebmarksOnline -- web resources and destinations for web designers and developers</title>

But don't make it too long otherwise it makes it difficult for people to bookmark and it will get cut off by the browser anyways. Try not to make it longer than 10 words or greater than 80 characters.

h1 Tag

Then put keyword phrase also as a header tag (if possible). For example ...

<h1>Cooking Chestnuts</h1>

But the <h1> tag produces extremely large and unsightly text. True, however, you can always style them with a CSS rule like ....

h1 { font-size: 1.2em; font-weight: bold; }

Search engines will give more weight to text found inside the <h1> tags than say the <h3> tags.

Now i n the body of the HTML page, have the words "cooking chestnut" somewhere in your text. If the phrase is bolded with the <strong> tags around it, or if it is emphazied with the <em> tag around it, then might help too. But don't overdo it. Otherwise search engines will consider that "keyword spamming" and rank your page lower than it otherwise would (or even worst get you banned from their search engine index). Also, you should write your pages primarily for your users rather than for search engines. It is no good if you users finds your page high in the search results and find that you page doesn't read well or looks like spam and quickly clicks away. You have to have good content to keep the readers.

And lastly, try to name the HTML page with the keyword phrase. In our example, you can give the filename as cooking-chestnuts.html Some of the more intelligent search engines will be able to parse out the words even if you don't have a hypen such as if you had named it cookingchestnuts.html. But for the sake of those engines that don't, I generally like to put in the hypen.

So when the search engines sees the phrase "cooking chestnuts" in the <title>, <h1>, and one or two times in the <body>, the search engine will start associating the phrase with your page.

Meta Tags

Another tags that you should know about is the meta description tag and the keyword tag.

In the <head> portion of your page, you want to add a description tag like ...

<meta name="description" content="Learn the art of cooking chestnuts. " />

This causes the search engine to display "Learn the art of cooking chestnuts" as the description for your page in the search results. Note that I used the keyword phrase in the description instead of "Learn to cook chestnuts" which does not contain the keyword phrase. Don't know how much this will help. But if you can word in the keyword phrase, why not?

Although search engines no longer give much weight to the use of the keyword tag, there is no harm in having it. It is also in the <head> portion of your page.

<meta name="keywords" content="cooking chestnuts " />

In the past the intent of this tag is to help the search engine associates the keywords "cooking" and "chestnut" with the page. But now a days, search engines are are smart enough to figure out what your page is about without this tag. So it doesn't look at it anymore, because of spammers abusive use of that tag.

Use Alt for Images

Search engines can not see and interpret the photos on your images, but it does read the alt attributes of your <img> tags and the filename of your image. If you have a photo of someone cooking chestnuts, add in an alt attribute and name your filename with keyworks. For example...

<img src="cooking-chestnuts.jpg" alt="person cooking chestnuts" />

You might also want to add in the title attribute to your image tag as well. For example,

<img src="cooking-chestnuts.jpg" alt="person cooking chestnuts" title="person cooking chestnuts" />

Name your HTML page with Keywords

Search engines will also look at the filename of the HTML filename. Hence it is good to name your HTML file cooking-chestnuts.html rather than page4.html.

Links with Keyword Text

Another thing that helps is having links with keywords as the text value of the link somewhere in the body of the paragraphs. For example,

Need some dinner ideas? Try this <a href="http://www.somecookingsite.com" > chestnut recipe</a>

Note the the text within the <a> tag contains the keyword chestnut? This is much better than linking like ...

Try <a href="http://www.somecookingsite.com">this</a> chestnut recipe.

Becareful not to overdo it with this technique. I would not have more than a few links.

Which Keyword to optimize for?

Do I optimize of "cooking chestnuts", or "cook chestnut", or "roast chestnut"? A tool that help is Overtures Keyword Selector Tool

Type in "cooking chestnuts" in the tool and see how often users are search for that phrase. And type in "cook chestnuts", "roast chestnuts" and compare.

Next

In the next lesson, you will learn why it is beneficial to have information-rich pages.