Many web content writers frequently obsess about whether or not they should be concerned with keyword density. For those who haven’t yet heard the term, or are unsure what it’s all about, keyword density refers to the number of times a particular keyword or keyword phrase appears in a piece of web content. Way back at the beginnning of web publishing, some 10-15 years ago, it was not uncommon for marketers who wanted to rank their content highly to “keyword stuff” their articles and web pages. This meant that they would use  their primary keyword a large number of times, almost to the point of making it unreadable. This didn’t matter to them though, as they were after rankings, and the search engines’ algorithms hadn’t yet evolved to the point where they could see this for what it was.

Fast forward to today and the landscape is far different. With so much competition out there and the SE algorithms so much more advanced, getting away with anything like this is unheard of now. The search engines prize readable, valuable content and those that are best able to provide that are going to be placed ahead of those that are still trying to game the system. The name of the game now is great content, and toward that end a new reality has come to the area of keyword density.

Today, it’s all about readability. While the search engines aren’t about to tell us exactly what factors they use to rank one sight over another, (such as the appropriate number of times a keyword should appear!) we are left to use empirical evidence to decipher what works. At this writing, it seems to be the best practice to include your primary keyword in the title, the first sentence, and a 2-4 more times in the article, blog post post, or web page. As a general rule, aim for no more than1.5 occurrences for every 100 words.

Doing things in this fashion, along with sprinkling in a lot of expert verbiage concerning the niche or market being discussed, will keep you on the right side of the search engine Gods…for now!

This is a frequent question from those of us engaged in content marketing: when do you get ranked? You spend a lot of time, effort, and money creating content for your sites, blogs, and marketing efforts, and it can be very discouraging when you fail to see a return on those efforts for a long time. Let’s look at some of the factors involved in getting your content ranked, and how long these can take to bear fruit.

So before the rankings comes the work you need to do to get ranked. This primarily involves creating content, getting backlinks to your pages, and further optimizing your content and pages to be able to merit ranking in the search engines. Google and the others look for several things when determining whether or not a page should be ranked, and how high. This is an involved, secret algorithm that includes an alchemy consisting of on-page  factors such as keywords, semantics, and internal linking. This part is thought to account for around 30% of your ranking.

The other 70% has to do with off page SEO, which is primarily building links to your site, preferably with anchor text keywords you would like to be ranked for. The number of links you need for a first page ranking is determined by looking at your competition, and seeing how many links they have to their sites. Then, you go create more! This is one of the simpler, yet harder to do tasks to get accomplished. Link building is a tedious and time consuming process that you will be doing as long as the Web is dependent upon links as a factor in how to rank sites — which means the foreseeable future!

How fast you can rank for your keywords is a hard question to answer. If you have an exact match keyword domain, with that keyword having very little competition and you build a few incoming links, you can rank for that term overnight. The downside to that much of a “long tail” keyword term is that it will not get very many searches. Getting ranked for more competitive keyword terms will take correspondingly longer.

The best way to ensure that you get ranked as highly as you can as quickly as you can is to start and stay the course with an aggressive, consistently applied linking campaign. Nothing less will do!

You likely have heard the term “local search” in reference to search engine rankings and traffic. Many seem to be perplexed as to how to implement a local search strategy and if it’s even important for them and the future of their business. Let’s take a quick look at why it may be a bonanza for your site, and then again, why it may not!

One thing to get out there right now: Google thinks local search is VERY important. According to Google, one out of every three search queries on mobile have local intent. While that is just mobile phones, understand that within the next year or two web-enabled mobile devices will outnumber PCs and you can start to see where this is going.

So what does this mean for the average marketer? Well, if you have any sort of local business that needs local leads for anything, it should be screaming “opportunity!” Local search means that your business can be listed when searchers in your particular geographic area type in their search query and you can be among the entries listed there. You have to do a bit of groundwork to get your site listed, and there is more to choose from than merely Google. Sites like Yelp, Yellowpages.com, Yahoo, Bing, and many others offer a wide variety of local listings that the search engines will pull from when they have a corresponding local search request.

This can mean having your site listed in Google Places (formerly Google Maps) as one of those locations on the small map that comes up in many searches. It can also mean that the organic search results will be far more likely to show your site for a search like “flower shop burbank ca” if you have done your job and made sure that your local bases are covered and submitted. Optimizing content and web pages for local terms makes a great deal of sense if you have a business that can benefit by using local search.

If, on the other hand, you are selling digital widgets to the whole world and don’t have a local business per se, then it doesn’t make as much sense to do all the work associated with getting the listings. In fact, you will encounter roadblocks if you try and make a purely online business local. It can be done, but only with a great deal of guile and subterfuge. Not worth it in my opinion.

If you do have local ties, make sure to utilize local search all you can. It’s only going to get more important as we go forward!

There has been a lot of buzz lately on the topic of whether or not it’s a good idea to purchase domain names that target specific keywords, and whether or not that is a benefit for your site. Related to this is the question of whether domain age is useful in the whole equation. Let’s look at these.

So is it a good idea to have a keyword specific domain name? We feel the answer is… maybe. Think about it: for a very popular term in a market, the term would not be available in any extension and very often the stakes have risen in that keyword space, where  the number of backlinks and other factors far outweigh the juice given to the keyword in the actual domain.  You’ll see exact match domains, subdomains, and folders that bear the terms, and just as many or more that do not.

It’s almost exactly the reverse for long tail keyword phrases. Given that many of them do not have large numbers of backlinks and authority as of yet, the weighting of that particular factor is higher in the  final outcome and you’ll find many exact match domains carrying Page One listings, based on little more than the keyword in the domain.

So for practical purposes, for larger, authority sites, don’t worry about it so much. For smaller, highly-niched sites, consider an exact match domain if it is available.

As far as aged domains go, the answer is an emphatic YES. Google gives them a lot of weight. There is a trend toward buying aged domains that carry both Page Rank and sometimes DMOZ or Yahoo directory listings. These obviously sell at a premium, but the benefits could be huge. The longer a domain has been live on the Web with no drops and no questionable history, the more valuable it is!

Something to think about!

There is a general belief out there that on-page SEO accounts for around 30% of your page’s ranking, while off-page SEO accounts for the other 70%. Since on-page is something we can effect today (whereas off-page, which consists primarily of link building, can take much longer), I thought it would be useful to take a look at several items you can get started on to make your pages more SEO friendly, and thus rank better.

* Page Title Tags – Each page on your site or blog should have it’s own keyword-optimized title tag. This is perhaps the most important part of on-page SEO. Search engines routinely check this as an identifier as to what your page is all about. Make sure your page’s primary keyword is in there, and that it is well written. Don’t keyword-stuff!

* Meta Description Tag - While not counted on so much for SEO benefit, the tag is often used as your page’s description in the search engines.

* H1 – H3 Headline Tags - Make use of these tags, using keywords in them as much as makes sense semantically. The H1 through the H3  headlines are the most useful.

* Internal Links – Linking to the other pages on your site through the use of in-text, keyword anchor text links is a terrific way to boost your internal pages. This is becoming ever more popular. As a example, if you have a page on keyword research, you would want to link to it through your pages, and not simply the site navigation.

* Outbound Links To Authority Sites – Google is fond of seeing links of this type to outbound authority sites as a way of providing value to your visitors. This is also useful for generating trackback links to your own site. See, good things come to those who give!

* Tagging Images with ALT Tags – Make sure to tag your images using the ALT attribute, and not irrelevant words, even if they are keywords.

* Keywords and Tags - Make sure you have a plan to work in your keywords, not only into your titles, headlines, and body text, but also in any tags you are able to include, particularly on your blog. Be sure not to overdo this, however, as too much of this good thing will lead to problems!  One keyword occurrence per 100 words is a good benchmark to shoot for.

Doing these simple tasks, many of which can be accomplished when creating your copy, can go a long way toward optimizing your pages well, and help them rank higher in the SERPS (search engine results pages). Now all you have to do is get busy building some links to deal with the off-page side of the equation!

You may think that having a catchy string of words is the primary function of the title of any piece you are using for web content creation. The truth is, a catchy, well-crafted title will do far more than that  if given half a chance! There needs to be some thought put behind the choices made here, so let’s take a quick look at how your titles can work for you!

Whether you are doing some article marketing, blog posts, Web 2.0 marketing or anything else to be published on the web, there are several best practices to keep in mind when crafting your copy. Here are 8 quick tips for making your titles not only stand out, but work for you!

1. Use Keywords -  Use your keywords in the title, preferably near the beginning. This will ensure that your keywords will be in the title tag, and thus helping your page to be found for that term.
2. Be Specific – Search engines, particularly Google, prize the title tag. It is considered to be a major ranking factor for your page, so you want it to be not only relevant to the content on the page, but keyword driven and engaging as well. Conversely, pages that obscure the content on the page by using titles that are too cryptic or intentionally using linkbait to drive news-driven traffic to offers are eventually weeded out, and will not rank long term.
3. Be Relevant – Keeping your page titles relevant is even more valuable now as RSS feed aggregators, directories, search engines, and more use them as listings, headings, and bookmarks for your page. This can help you in your organic rankings as well.
4. Keep It Short –   Many times your titles are truncated after 64 characters, including spaces. Don’t go over that limit unless you don’t mind the rest of the title sometimes being missing!
5. Be Plain Spoken - Talk to your readers plainly, and don’t use high falutin’ language in an attempt to make your content more “scholarly” than it really is. This puts people off, and the headline skimmers likely won’t read any further.
6. Call To Action - If possible, include a call to action within your title, exhorting your reader to read on about the benefits of taking your content to heart!
7. Don’t Use Stop Words -  Stop words are words like “and”, “the”, “a” or “an”. Search engines don’t read them, and it’s better sometimes to use a dash (-) instead. This also saves on character space.
8. Don’t Keyword Stuff - Okay, I did say that you needed keywords in your title, but I didn’t say you needed them all in there! There is really no need to do this. Using your primary keyword, and perhaps one secondary if it fits, is plenty.

Optimizing your titles in this fashion should make your pages rank better for the keywords you are going after and make a better reading experience for your visitors!