Think theme, not keyword phrases - page 2

by Andy Williams, 3/27/2007

Nowadays that optimization technique would be labelled as keyword stuffing by the search engines and ranked appropriately.

In fact, I would not recommend any technique that had hard and fast rules about where to insert keywords into a document. With rules, you leave footprints, and footprints are visible to the search engines.

This week I read a newly released "SEO tutorial" which offered exact methods of keyword placement involving inserting exact numbers of keywords into various parts of a page. Sure it helps a writer concentrate on the objective of the article having such firm rules, but don't expect it to help your rankings. If you follow the same rules on all your content, all your content has the same footprint.

Obviously keywords are important since they will tell the search engines what a page is about. Don't forget though that keywords in incoming link text is important (even more important than the keywords on a page) in the page ranking.

Keyword optimization must involve both on-page and off-page strategies.

Off page factors are relatively easy. Select several phrases you want to rank for, and get incoming links that include those phrases. Add more phrases into the inbound link text mix as time goes by.

On-page optimization appears a little trickier.

The way you should be thinking about writing content is not so much about focusing on individual keywords, but more on the overall theme of a page.

Go to article page:

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