Article printed from SEO-News: http://www.seo-news.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.seo-news.com/archives.html

Key Wording Your Web Site With Natural Language
By Rusty Ford (c) 2007

Ever since the beginning of search engines there has been the
discussion of key wording. Obviously your web page has to be
about something and you want the search engine to reflect that
in its results. In the early days of search engines you could
put words or phrases anywhere on a page and show up in the
results. People who just wanted traffic would get a list of the
most popular used keywords and just put them on a page. The page
could have been about toilets but show up in search results
about Hollywood celebrities. In those days finding what you
wanted was a daunting task. So the search engines started
looking at natural language. Each year they have become more
sophisticated about how they look at natural language.

The first thing they did was to stop looking at keyword meta
tags. Too often people were putting keywords in that did not
match their page. Next they started punishing people for putting
strings of key words together, such as "baseball baseball
baseball". Next they paid attention to whether or not they were
used in a sentence. Then they started evaluating the content of
the page to see what it was about. By this time they were
getting really accurate in their search results. But as long as
there are search engines people will try to fool them. For the
last couple of years search engine optimization people have
promoted keyword stuffing. This is where you put the keyword in
the text as often as you can fit it in.

A new generation of natural language algorithms has been
developed by the major search engines to combat this. Now for
the first time we are hearing the use of the term natural
language. Now search engines look at the way that a term is
used. They compare the use of the term in the context of how it
is used. This example is a little extreme, but we have all seen
pages written like this.

"I bought baseball cards for my friend the baseball card lover.
He was so happy to get the baseball cards and he looked at
baseball cards. Then he showed these baseball cards to all his
friends that had baseball cards."

This is an example of how the term baseball card was used
outside of natural language. In natural language you would not
refer to your friend as the baseball card lover. In later uses
you would have used the term "them" to describe the baseball
cards. The sentence would look like "He was so happy to get them
that he took the time to look at each one".

It is still important to get your keywords or keyword phrases
on the page regularly. Care needs to be given on how they are
used. It is important to have them in complete sentences and not
in an abnormal place in the context of a paragraph. Here are
some guidelines you might consider. No one knows the exact
algorithms that the search engines use and they all have
different ones. But, you can presume that they are based on the
natural use of language so the following recommendations are
based on basic grammar and the normal use of language.
Here are some examples of natural use of key words.

1. It is natural to have your keywords in your title and
description meta tags. These tell what your page is about and
your page should be about the same thing as your keywords are.

2. It is natural to have your keywords in your heading tags.
Heading tags should be used as chapter headings to different
sections of a page.

3. It is natural to have your keywords in the first sentence.

4. It can be natural to have your keywords appear once in most
paragraphs.

5. It can be natural to have your keywords appear more than
once in a paragraph but not every paragraph. You need to make
sure that it fits well and does not sound like it was just stuck
in there.

Here are some examples of non-natural uses of keywords.

1. It is not natural to have your key words more than once in
your title or description.

2. It is not natural to have your key words show up more
than once in a sentence. There are times that this could be
natural, but it would probably be better to make it into two
sentences.

3. It is not natural for the same sentence to appear in several
different paragraphs.

4. In a short paragraph, it is not natural for your keywords to
show up more than twice. In a paragraph over 6 sentences long
this may not hold true. (I publish health related web pages and
read hundreds of health articles a month. There are times that I
will see a term used 3 times in a long paragraph and almost
never in a short one.

5. It is not natural to have keywords used back to back in a
sentence. It is not typical to have one sentence end in a word
and the next sentence to begin with it.

6. It is not natural to have every sentence begin with the same
word or phrase.

Following these guidelines may help you with search engine
positioning and it will definitely make your page more enjoyable
for your visitors.
================================================================
Article by Rusty Ford, Editor http://arthritis-symptom.com/
================================================================

Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SEO-News is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.