The Quest Continues
by Joshua Hay / E-Web Design & Marketing
So far in our quest to break the myth that “SEO is all about page titles and Meta tags”, we have talked about how to properly optimise these features of your page, as well as the importance of crawlable content for the search engine spiders, determining the code to text ratio for your site and simple changes that can increase it. This month I will help you to further optimise your pages using keyword prominence and internal linking strategies.
What is Keyword Prominence?
Keyword prominence… it’s pretty self explanatory! How prominent are your keywords and phrases within the body of your page? In order to analyse the keyword prominence you will first need to have applied the changes from my previous article at which point you will have determined which keywords you want to target on which pages of your site. Remember that every page of your site is a potential landing page for traffic from the search engines so spreading your keywords across the pages in your site is invaluable in increasing keyword density – and with increased keyword prominence we are creating a strong foundation for search engine rankings on those chosen terms.
How can we increase it on our pages!?
There are numerous methods that can be employed on a page to increase the keyword prominence including use of targeted keywords in headings (represented in HTML with the tags h1 h2, etc), use of targeted keywords as internal text links to other pages (not image links) and emphasis of targeted keywords/phrases in the webpage content through the use of bolding. Highlighting of words is also said by some to increase prominence; however it can quite easily reduce the visual quality of a page so we tend to avoid it.
Adding heading tags can vary in complexity dependant on your page structure. It may be that you can insert headings for existing page copy and break up that existing copy with sub headings for different paragraphs, however in most cases you will need to make use of style sheets to ensure the headings match the appearance and theme of your site. If your site is limited by its design you may be able to replace image headings with text headings, or insert some sub headings into existing text. These heading tags should follow a logical pattern – that is h1, h2, h3 and onwards throughout your copy – much like you would when creating a word document. Each of these tags will be weighted; however some engines (e.g. Yahoo!) will give them more weight than others (e.g. Google).
Another method that, when used in moderation, is very beneficial is the bolding of keywords using b or strong tags. We tend to use strong tags here as it conforms with more recent HTML standards, however it will depend on the standard used for your pages and either way has the same effect. Bolding of important words throughout your text draws emphasis to them for the reader. In turn it also draws the attention of the search engine spiders. Logically speaking, if you have bolded certain words or phrases for your readers than you must want your users to pay special attention to them – likewise the search engine algorithm determines that these are the words important to the page, and to the potential visitors to that page.
In order to make use of this technique without going over board, some common sense needs to come into the equation. What the search engines strive to achieve is quality results for their users – so if you go bolding text all over your page like a mad man (or mad woman) rather than bolding the key points, then you are not creating usefulness for the user. The best strategy is to write your page copy in such a way that your key terms are mentioned and can be bolded within the flow of the text. We would rarely bold an exact key phrase and expect it to blend with the flow of the text so in most cases we will bold a sentence or partial sentence that contains the keyword or phrase - be it in exact order or through similar wording.
For example if I were to rewrite the above paragraph with the intention of ranking for the key word copywriting the changes may include rewriting one of the sentences to read “The best strategy is to engage quality copywriting in such a way that your key terms are mentioned and can be bolded within the flow of the text”.
Are you saturating?
A website can have many pages but that does not necessarily mean that all the pages will be recognised and indexed by the search engines. To achieve better search engine rankings, a website must have as many pages as possible indexed by the search engine as relevant to its targeted keywords. Every page of a website acts as a potential landing page for search engine traffic. The more pages indexed by the search engine, the greater the range of keywords that a site is likely to be found for and the greater the volume of traffic the site is likely to receive from search engines.
This Search Engine Saturation tool measures the number of pages that have actually been indexed by a range of the most popular search engines. Not all search engines report this information but enough of them do to create some meaningful benchmarks for your search engine optimisation strategy. In terms of Australian results, you can manually determine the number of pages indexed for your site using the following search queries;
| Search Engine |
Command |
|
Google.com.au |
“site:www.yourdomain.com.au” |
|
Yahoo7.com.au |
“site:www.yourdomain.com.au” |
|
Ninemsn.com.au |
“site:www.yourdomain.com.au” |
Yes – each uses the same command for checking pages indexed! You will find that your Yahoo!7 query takes you to “Site Explorer” which is a service in beta testing that will allow you to see some info about your site in the Yahoo! Index. The information available includes pages indexed and links recorded among other things.
Helping spiders along
Generally speaking, search engines discover your site, and then the pages within your site, by following links. The easier it is for the spider to follow these links the greater chance it will find and index all your pages. There are a number of ways in which we can help make the search engine spider’s job easier but some will have to wait for next month!
However what we can work on this month is the linking structure on your site. First and foremost – is your navigation able to be read by the search engine spider? It is not uncommon to see fancy, sliding, graphical, and interactive menus on websites. Whilst they look great for the user, often these menus are produced using scripts such as JavaScript which will leave the search engine spider confused and struggling to find a path through to your pages.
If this sounds like your site then you will either need to rebuild your navigation or add a secondary set of text links to each of your main pages (as a minimum) somewhere on each page. E-Web often redevelops the navigational elements of our clients’ sites and rapidly sees a jump in the number of pages indexed by the search engines.
Two birds with one stone
The next step in increasing the ease of which both users and search engine spiders are able to navigate your site and find as much information as possible as quickly as possible is to insert text links into the copy of your page. This will actually be a positive step towards both issues I’ve talked about this month. By adding relevant links in your page copy that point to other pages on your site we’re increasing the keyword density for those words used in the link.
When a text link is interpreted by the search engine spider it will read the words used for the link and view them as a description of the page the link points to. This is why the wording used (or anchor text as it is often referred to) in the link plays an important role in both on-page and off-page SEO.
If I reuse my previous example and rewrite it yet again including links it may go from looking like this;
“The best strategy is to engage quality copywriting in such a way that your key terms are mentioned and can be bolded within the flow of the text”.
To looking like this;
“The best SEO strategy is to engage quality copywriting in such a way that your key terms are mentioned and can be bolded within the flow of the text”.
I have moved my bolded keywords to “best SEO strategy” and have now linked the keywords “quality copywriting”. This link would point to a page within my site (or a partner’s site - if they are doing the same for you!) that is relevant to copywriting or can capture the visitors details in order to provide a quote or more information. Again there is a level of common sense involved with using this technique. If done cleverly you will increase your keyword density, increase your search engine saturation and help your users navigate your site with ease!
Next month I will expand further on increasing your search engine saturation using various site maps. I will also briefly touch on linking again from an off-page point of view. Doing so will lead me onwards towards other topic areas such as social media marketing so I can’t wait! Have a great month and I will talk to you soon.
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