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Do-It-Yourself SEO: Be Careful With Your Keywords

Written by: Karen Scharf

Article Overview: If you're trying to optimize your own website - and I strongly believe that all entrepreneurs and website owners should at least be familiar with optimization techniques - then there's a great possibility you've been researching and studying and reviewing all the information you can get.

Do-It-Yourself SEO: Be Careful With Your Keywords

If you're trying to optimize your own website - and I strongly believe that all entrepreneurs and website owners should at least be familiar with optimization techniques - then there's a great possibility you've been researching and studying and reviewing all the information you can get.

But you need to make sure that you're studying current information. That's because the search engines change their algorithms on a regular basis and if you're using outdated information you might be doing more damage than good.

A few years ago, entrepreneurs wanting to optimize their own web pages were taught to fill their pages with their keywords. No matter what. Just throw the keywords in whilly-nilly, and as long as the words appeared a certain percentage of the time, it didn't really matter whether they made sense or not.

If your keyword appeared over and over again in your web page, the search engines awarded you a lot of points. The web page that had the highest frequency of a particular keyword was awarded the most points and would appear first in the search engines.

But this system left a lot of room for abuse. Spammers quickly learned that they could stuff a web page with highly sought-after keywords and easily benefit from all that free traffic. In no time at all, the search engines were returning irrelevant results. The programmers knew that something had to change, or web surfers would no longer use their search engine.

So they changed their algorithms. Several times. And then a few more times.

And it is now much more important to write your web page copy in a natural manner, so your human visitors will understand what you're talking about. After all, it's your human visitors who are reading your text. It's your human visitors who are buying your products. It's your human visitors who are becoming your clients.

But there is actually more to it than that. Writing naturally is more than just being altruistic and acknowledging that your website visitors are actually living, breathing, human beings. Writing for humans IS writing for the search engines.

That's because the search engines have gotten smarter. Really smart. (Almost scary smart.) They now actually have the ability to distinguish between natural, human language and keyword-stuffed or machine-generated language. They can utilize latent semantic indexing to determine whether the surrounding text is legitimately discussing the keywords in question.

So be careful with your keywords. Don't force them to appear a certain number of times, resulting in an unnatural flow of your web copy. Write your text naturally, so it reads just like you would talk.

And use complimentary keywords. If your web page is about German Shepherds, be sure to include the words "dog" and "puppy" and other equivalent words. Read your text out loud. If it doesn't sound like you would say it, rewrite it.

The good news is, this is a win-win-win situation. You will find it is actually easier to write your web copy when you write in a natural manner. The search engines will be able to return relevant results. And your web visitors will find the content and information they are actually looking for, rather than a spammy, keyword-stuffed web page.

Oh yeah, you'll probably make more sales too.

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Article Tags: internet marketing, keywords, online marketing, SEO



Related Forum Posts
Re: Web Business Podcast is LIVE! :) - Hi David - have you thought of making these into videos? Even if it doesn't have you live on screen? Remembering the Success Secret Keywords would be a lot easier if we could see them.
Re: SEO... - 1: Find the Best Keywords 2: Discover Your Competitors 3: Optimize Your Title 4: Optimize Your META Tags 5: Use Headings 6: Use Title and ALT Attributes 7: Nomenclatures 8: Create a Site Map Page 9: Include a robots.txt File 10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google MySQL/Oracle:
Scoping Your Articles for Ghostwriters - Martin, can you advise your process for scoping out the work for article writing. specifically, 1. How do you scope the boundaries of the article? (is it by the Keywords?) 2. How many keywords do you provide to the ghostwriter for an article of a certain size? 3. How do you measure quality? (is it just your impression that the article is good)? 4. Who owns the article? 5. How do you know that this article is not published elsewhere on the Internet? Thanks
Re: Traffic! How do you get it? - I agree, [i:1z2pskgt]"The solution before getting traffic, is RESEARCH"[/i:1z2pskgt]. "Keywords" are the source of traffic and its completely true that we should do a bit of research before crafting an article. Now a days, i see like its quite easy to rank well for long tail keywords esp. on Google because of the "freshness" in serp. The newly indexed articles are placed above the older articles to show fresh content to the user. Its advantage too but the question is, how long you stay in top position ?
Keywords - Keywords in your URL are good, but you also need to include these in headings on your pages. If you were going to search Google for this content, what words would you use? What common words would people use in a search engine if they wanted to find your site? You don't need to overdo the headers, just add a couple to each page and especially on your home page to attract search engines. I think someone also mentioned listing your site in directories. This is good and make sure to list your site under beauty - this should attract people that want to find you. Trading links with sites is good and especially sites that attract the people you want to bring onto your site. Miss Shri


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