Amount of Keywords?

[Jayne]

Hi,

Been having a nosey at keywords etc on top sites. I was told it isn't good to put too many in. One of the sites had 27 phrases in there site and another had too many to count (i'm too tired to anyway).

Why are they at number one spot if they are putting that many words in. Plus one had like hidden words in, you could just see them on the white area at the top of the site?

Bit puzzled?

Please explain

Jayne

 

[NuBlue]

Hi Jayne,

Spiders and Keywords - Search engines use whats called spiders to crawl your site for various factors (far too many to mention in 1 post.) Keywords are one of these factors. As a general rule they only usually cache the first 200 characters or so within the keyword tags. So any more keywords then this is usually a waste of time.

New Sites - If you have just developed a website, it is best to try and pick three or four keywords which are relevant to your subject. http://www.goodkeywords.com/ is a good place to start. Download and use the tool to suggest good keywords. Put these words in Google and see what the competition is. If Google displays 400 million results for a keyword then chances of getting to the top are slim. If it displays 400 thousand then your chances are much better. (sorry if that seems patronising, but some people dont seem to realise : )

Optimising - Next thing to do once you have chosen you keywords is to search them in Google and analyse the results. Pick the top five results and look at there source code. Find out how many times they have repeated these keywords, are the keywords placed in bold, headers, italics etc. Once you have done the research (the more the better) you should have a good idea of what you need to do to get listed for these key words.

Once you've made it - Once you are at the top for these keywords, you can start adding more keywords in your meta tags and try to optimise for these as well. Sites with lots of keywords have usually been running for a long time (or are very optimistic). Patience is the key, don't be in a rush to get to the top of search engines, gradual progression is often better then trying to leap to the front of the queue.


Hope this helps

 

[Jayne]

Hi,

Thanks Michael, I have learned most of this stuff from an earlier post, I just couldn't understand why I was told to only put a few key words/phrasers, when the sites at the top, all had lots!

I get it now though thanks to you...The higher you go, the more keywords you put in. I do know it'll take quite a while, just wanted to know, so I could make sure i'd done my site ok for a new starter.

Jayne

 

[DuaneJackson]

Hi,

Thanks Michael, I have learned most of this stuff from an earlier post, I just couldn't understand why I was told to only put a few key words/phrasers, when the sites at the top, all had lots!

In a nutshell, it's because there are a number of differnet factors that get you a #1 ranking. They may have their keywords all wrong, so they must have some of the other factors spot on.

 

[c2webdesign]

Hey Jane,

Usually its best calculated on a %. Roughly its recognised that your keywords should make up around 5-8% of the total text on your page.

Although they have 27 keyword phrases (which is quite excessive) it could be the total number of words on their site is 400 (meaning their keywords are around 6% of the total number of words - quite acceptable).

Although, as Duane says, there are a lot of factors that will effect where a site is positioned. It may be they have very respected and related sites linking to them pushing up their position.

Dean
C2 Web Design
http://www.c2webdesign.co.uk

Web Design | Online Marketing | Search Engine Optimisation

 

[Jayne]

Thank you both, I understand it fully now. I like to know things (learn) and this stuff was puzzling me, that's why I posted. I am very grateful for all your help, i'll be able to sleep tonight now

Thanks again

Jayne