The content of a web site is an important component of search engine optimization for two reasons. First, great content attracts visitors. It also attracts links from other sites, which helps with ranking in the search engines. Second, search engine spiders love content as well, especially keyword rich content. As a result, optimizing your content with keywords is one of the most important things you can do with your site.
The first step in optimizing content is deciding on the theme. Each page on the web site should have one overall theme. Once you know what the theme or topic of a page, you can assign keywords to that page that relate to the overall theme. There should be one keyword phrase combination per page that includes the main phrase plus a few variations of that phrase. If there is more than one theme for a page, consider dividing it into two pages.
Next, the page should be structured with a descriptive headline at the top. The headline gives the title or subject of the page. Keywords should be included in headlines. Search engines look at headlines as important text because it is a title or an overall description of the text that follows. The headline should make sense and be descriptive.
The body text comes after the headlines and expands upon the title or subject of the page. Keywords should appear in the body text throughout the page. This helps to define the overall theme of your page. Most importantly keywords should be near the top of the page and at the beginning of each paragraph.
Additional steps include defining the alt attributes for any images on the page. The alt attribute is alternate text for the images on a web site. This text is displayed when users have images turned off in their browsers. Alt text is also read by text reading browsers used by the seeing impaired. If there are any words in the image, they should be spelled out in the alt attribute. This is a good place for keywords, but do not overdo it by adding keyword lists. Ultimately, it should describe what is in the image or spell out any text in the image.
Having keywords throughout your page will help determine your rankings ultimately. If they keywords in your title and meta tags match the words in the headlines and on the page, your pages will have a much greater chance of ranking for those keywords.
However, when writing or creating content, write for your target audience and not for the search engines. If a visitor finds your page via a search engine and the page doesn’t make sense because it is littered with keywords, they will leave the site and probably not come back. When optimizing content, the words should always make sense and flow together nicely.
