07 May 09 SEO SIMPLIFIED – Keywords in Content Part – II

Written by: bikram

In the last article we discussed about keyword density and how much it is important in writing search engine friendly content. Everything said and done, keyword density is not the only thing that is of paramount importance in SEO content writing. Keyword density does matter there is no denial about that, but there are some more things that work hand in hand with keyword density to give your webpage the maximum possible position in the search result. Keyword Prominence, keyword frequency, keyword ranking and keyword proximity are those things. In this article we will talk about Keyword prominence.

By keyword prominence we mean how prominent your keyword is within a webpage. This is important, the sooner your keyword will appear in the content the more relevant your content will appear to the search engine, and in the directory based search engines prominence plays a very important role.

Let’s use an example to understand this concept. Suppose the first two words of your content are marketing and e-Books, and the webpage is optimized for the keyword “marketing e-Book” then this keyword has 100 percent prominence within the given webpage, thus, this webpage will rank higher in the search engine when compared to the page that has the keyword in the second or third sentence. The keyword prominence is calculated in the following way.

1.       Keyword Prominence would be 100 percent, if the keyword appears at the beginning of the content.

2.       Keyword Prominence would be 50 percent, if the keyword appears in the middle of the content.

3.       Keyword Prominence would be 0 percent, if the keyword appears at the end of the article.

4.       Keyword Prominence would be 50 percent, if the keyword appears at the beginning and another repetition appears towards the end of the article.

5.       If a webpage contains multiple parts (subdivided by headings, h1, h2, h3, h4 etc.) then for the keyword prominence calculation, all the parts will be considered as one single contiguous piece.

Keyword prominence tips

In the following paragraphs, you will learn how to achieve keyword prominence for your webpage.

Title tag: Use the most important keyword in the title as the title tag of the webpage is read as the page title of the webpage by the major search engines. Make sure the keyword appears as early in the title as possible. If possible put the keyword at the very beginning.

Meta tags: Same principle works here, so keep the keyword as close to start as you can in the meta description tag, and in the meta keyword tag keep the most important keyword at the start and move downward. (A detailed article on keyword ranking will come soon).

Alt tag: Use your most important keyword in the alt tag of the image within your webpage. If there are more than one image then you can use keywords based on their ranking vis-à-vis the importance of the image for the webpage. If the image is used under a heading tag then the alt tag of that image should correspond to the most important keyword of the paragraph written under the heading tag in question

Headline tag (h1, h2, h3, h4): Start all the headings within an article with the most important keyword.

Anchor text: Using your most important keyword as an anchor text for both incoming and outgoing links will help your page become more visible to the search engine. Use your keywords in text containing internal links as well.

Body text: Ideally the article should begin with the most important keyword, but if it is difficult to do then try using the most important keyword in the first sentence of the first paragraph.

As a rule of thumb, you should use your most important keyword twice in the first paragraph, at least once in the middle and once in the last paragraph. Other keywords can be scattered at even places. (Read more about keyword frequency in the forthcoming article on keyword frequency).

Tags: Denial, E Book, E Books, H3, Headings, Keyword Density, Keyword Marketing, Keywords, Maximum, Paramount Importance, Prominence, Proximity, Repetition, Search Directory, search engine, Search Engines, Search Result, SEO