Since most Web surfers use search engines (SE's) as their starting point, it's extremely helpful to know a few things about how to drive traffic to your web site. Queries on search engines often turn up thousands or more of matching results. In most cases only the ten most relevant matches are displayed on the first page. Most of you probably would not bother to go searching beyond this page, as you most likely will find what you are looking for in the "top ten" results. Of course, every webmaster would like to see his/her web site being displayed on that first page. The more somebody has to click through the search results to get to your site the more it is likely he/she will find something interesting before even getting to your page. So the aim is to rank as high in the SE's listing as possible. You can boost your traffic and get the attention you want if you know a bit about how the major search engines (SE) work and consider a few simple rules.

Content is King

Location and Frequency

Location: Pages with the search term appearing in the title tag or near the top of the web page, such as in the heading or in the first few paragraphs are deemed more relevant than others. The title should be attractive and kept as short as possible, nobody likes to read more than they need to. This holds particulary true for online media. If you take the analogy to a book for example, you probably would first start looking for the search term in the title of the book and pick the most appropriate one rather than just skimming through the pages. The same goes with search engines, they simply assume that any words or phrases relevant to the topic will be mentioned right at the beginning.

They also treat keywords to the left of the title as the most important, so you don’t want a title like "My Company: Delivering Cheap and Cost Effective Widgets" if you have people searching for "Widgets". How many interior pages do you have on your site that only get read once in a while, if at all? A simple change of their title to include some keywords right at the beginning could make all the difference.

NOTE: Tables can "push" your text further down the page, even though it is positioned right at the top, making your keywords appear less relevant. It's to do with how tables are interpreted when read by search engines. Try to use tables only for tabular data and use CSS otherwise. The same applies to Flash animations, frames and JavaScript - large sections of JavaScript can make important keywords seem less relevant. If possible try to place your code as far down the page as possible.

Frequency is the other notable factor. The search engine analyzes how often a certain keyword appears in relation to other words and assigns relevance to it accordingly. It's important for your main keywords to have the correct density, the amount of keywords compared the the overall amount of words used throughout your page. For example, if a keyword was used 3 times in a page with 100 indexable text words the page would have a keyword density of 3%. Ultimately, keyword density should be high enough so that these words are recognized as an important topic of that page and not just an incidental occurance. At the same time this value should not be too high, as some SE's may penalize or even ban your site for "keyword stuffing". It's a bit of a tightrope walk and SEO experts vary in their views as to what is the optimal figure. A keyword's density ranging from 3% to 7% can be assumed to be within the normal limit, but anything beyond this might start to look unnatural to search engines and human beings in equal measure.

So, it's no good to just repeat key words without the proper context, search engines are sophisticated enough to detect these kind of methods, also known as spamming. It's definately not worth the risk, as this could mean the end to your business. Just try to be creative and take the time to write good content. If your pages are original and in demand you will automatically get a better chance of ranking higher in search engine lists.

Still, consider using the following "anchors" to incorporate your keywords in a natural manner: TITLE, META DESCRIPTION, META KEYWORDS, VISIBLE TEXT, ALT TAGS, COMMENT TAGS, DOMAIN NAME, IMAGE TAGS, LINKED TEXT, OPTION TAGS, REFERENCE TAGS. There are all legitimate ways to link keywords to your page.

NOTE: As for spamming technologies, there is evidence that the major search engines analyze pages looking for long-string repeats. It's best to mix up your keywords in the ALT tags etc. to be sure they don't follow the same sequence of words used elsewhere (text or META tags). For example, if you have a string lika that: "word1, word2, word3" try to make it "word2, word1, word3" instead next time! You are still using the same keywords only in a different order.

If you want to check your web site's key density try KeywordDensity.com! This free tool also allows you to calculate the word depth and has numerous options to analyze your page. You can even check your competitor's sites. Keyword Cloud is a visual depiction of keywords used on a web site. Words having higher density are shown in larger fonts, ideally the main keywords should appear in larger fonts at the start of the cloud.

Target Keywords

These are words you would like your page to be found for. Usually each page in your website will have different target keywords that reflect the content of your page. Ideally you want them to be unique, wich is nearly impossible as there is a lot of competition. So your best shot is to try using key phrases that are at least two or more words long. Especially in the online gambling affiliate industry (this would be an example of a combination of keywords) too many sites will be relevant for a single word as "casino" or "affiliate". You need to be creative and come up with a combination of different words to maximize your chance at succeeding.

An excellent web site for working with keywords is WordTracker. They also make a free Keyword Research Tool available, that assists you in finding the most popular choices for a certain combination of words. They also created a free complimentary 75 page guide with keyword advice from leading experts in the SEO industry about a fictional company selling vetetarian dog food. This is quite fun to read!

Create Relevant Content

Create relevant content by reflecting your target keywords in the page's content, pick up on the words you used in your title, heading and so on. That also means you should avoid using large sections of copy via graphics when you could use HTML text instead to achieve the same result. Search engines are not able to make sense out of images (GIF, JPEG etc.), although some of the search engines will index comments and ALT-text. It's always the better option to use HTML for text instead of images, not least because text often looks fuzzy the smaller it gets. Latest when it comes to people wanting to enlarge the font you will see what I mean.

Duplicate Content

Search engines don't like duplicate content! There are a number of reasons why pages don’t show up in search engine results.

One of them is when the content of more than one web pages appears to be substantially similar at each of the locations it is seen by the search engines.

What are the consequences?

This could mean that the pages are filtered at the time of serving the results for a request, and there is no way for you to know which version of that page will show in the results and which won't. It might not even be your fault, if someone just copied a page of yours (which of course is another issue and would be a copyright infringement) you would have to share sigificance with all those duplicate content pages. The other possibility is that some sites or pages either won't be indexed by the search engines or if it finds too many copies of the same pages under different URLs a complete site might be rendered invisible to searchers.

What is wrong with duplicate content?

There are various reasons why to search engines duplicate content is a red flag. One of them is that they don't want to show the same pages in their search results, as this does not look good and confuses people. The second reason is, that they don't like spending resources on indexing pages that are concidered too similar.

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