Day 3 - Using keywords to draw traffic to your site

As mentioned before keywords are important in determin the theme of your page. Repeating of keywords on the site itself is important as you have a linked theme throughout all your pages. Keyword used between [TITLE] tags of each page as this is the first thing search engines look at. Website pages should atleast contain 200 words of relevant text content to be picked up for search. That goes for each page of your website. Try as far as possible to keep keywords relevant to yours site's theme. Yet again that goes for every page. Do not hide repeated keywords in paragraphs by making the text the same colour as your page's background. This is considered as spamming and you will be penalised as far as your website's ranking is concerned. This applies to repeating keywords within bold tags. If your page is 'n visual disaster by clogging it with keywords, visitors will soon become disinterested. There are millions of webpages on the intenet. People remember the good ones. It is easy to forget a page that does not contain meaningful info and simply move onto the next one.

Here are some examples on using effective keywords. We'll use the example of the DVD shop again:

The primary keyword phrase contained on eache page might be something like "DVD Rental". Specific variations on the primary keyword might look like the following: "Horror DVD rental" ; "Classic DVD rental" , "Comdey DVD rental" , "Drama DVD rental".

Secondary keyword phrases might include: "Movie rentals" , "movie reviews" , "movie titles" , "latest DVD's" , "latest movies" , "DVD repairs" , "DVD recovery"

Each page on your site should inlcude your primary keyword phrase. Your homepage (usually something like "index.html" or "default.html" always gets the highest ranking and will link to other pages on your site. It is a good practise to optimise each page for no more than two different keyword phrases.


Keyword proximity is very important. The closer keywords are to each other, the better. As mentioned in the previous sections Google searches in the page title, headings, body text, links, image ALT text, filenames and domain names. To get a better understanding of keyword proximity or keyword density pop over to http://www.keyworddensity.com.

Remember that the "Keywords" META tags are ignored by Google, so rahter stick to the [title] tag for your keywords. Try to keep keywords under 60 characters. Some people advise against including your company name in [title] tags unless it is a well-known, well-branded company. They recommend to inlcude it at the end of your keywords phrase. I disagree on this, as many companies have unique names connecting them to the particular field of business they are involved in. If you have a flower shop, let's say ABC Flowers for argument's sake, you would want to include that as a primary keyword. The company specialises in flowers, after all.

The next post/section will focus on the different pages on your website, naming conventions and some tips on structuring your files and folders.