Some years ago, back when Alta Vista was still the search engine of choice, I tried to find one of thefreecountry.com’s most famous pages, The Free C / C++ Compilers page, on Alta Vista using the search term “+free +c++ +compilers”. I must have scanned at least 20 pages of the search results, but could not find that page listed anywhere.

Video Tutrioal Search phrase Solidity in Search Website Ranking

I went back and looked at my page again, and realised that in the interest of brevity, the phrase “C++ compiler” occurred on the page only once. I had listed every compiler on the page without the words “C++ compiler”. For example, the entry for “Borland C++ Compiler” was simply listed as “Borland”. While this kept my page size down, it did not help the search engine realize that my page was about C++ compilers. I did a simple change to the page so that every compiler was listed under its full name (with the “C++ compiler” bit), and resubmitted the page to Alta Vista.

After nearly a month, I checked Alta Vista again, using the same search terms. The page was now listed on the first page of the search results. Incredible!

(I don’t know if it’s still on the first page though, these positions change everytime someone submits a site.)

What is Keyword Density?

One of the simplest ways to improve your site’s placement in the search engine results is to work on the keyword density on your page, which was what I did.

For my purpose here, I will refer to a “keyword” as a word that the user searches for when using the search engine. Generally speaking, keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for (the keyword) against the total number of words appearing on your web page. If your keyword occurs only (say) once in a page of one thousand words, it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that occurs (say) four times in a page of similar length.

If a particular keyword has a higher density on your web page, then the likelihood of your page obtaining a better search engine ranking increases. Note that not all search engines bother with keyword density and indeed even those that do have their own algorithm for computing the density of a keyword. However, the principles described in this article is general enough to help your page improve its ranking in the engines that take keyword density into account.

How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

How do you improve your keyword density?

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Video Tutrioal 5 Ways to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

1. When planning a page, think about which search terms a user is likely to use when searching for the information your site provides. For example, a visitor who is looking for information on “Search Engine Ranking” may search for things like “search engine positioning”, “search engine ranking”, “search engine placement”, “keyword density”, “top ranking”, and the like.
2. After you have collected your list of keywords, do NOT simply dump those keywords into a senseless list on your web page. I’ve seen some websites do this in an attempt to influence search engine listings. This may not work with all search engines. Some of the engines attempt to be smart when processing keywords and if it sees keywords occurring together in a senseless sequence, it may penalise your website.
3. Instead, try to form sentences that use those keywords. If you are a good writer, you may have to kill some of those good habits you previously used in writing documents: for example, many good writers have an aversion to repeating a particular word too often, choosing instead to use alternative terms that mean the same thing. This makes for a more pleasant reading, but it will not help you get your site listed with a top rank in search engine results for that particular keyword.For instance, if you want your page to have a high ranking when someone searches for the phrase “search engine ranking”, keep repeating the phrase “search engine ranking” in your document instead of substituting with pronouns like “it” and the like. Do likewise for the other keywords that you want a high density on the page. You’ll of course have to use your discretion with this, or your page will be unpleasant to read.You can see an example of how this is done by examining this article itself, and see how often I have repeated keywords and phrases like “keyword”, “keyword density”, “search engine ranking” and “search engine positioning”.
4. In days of old, some people tried the trick of having a very short page for a particular keyword. For example, the page may only have the following one sentence: “Keyword density is important in search engine ranking.” Since there were so few words on the page, the page was actually easy to draft and the keywords “keyword density” and “search engine ranking” have a very high density on that page.This method is not very useful nowadays. For example, at the time I wrote this, it no longer appears to work with Alta Vista, which seems to rank pages that are bigger than 4K more favourably.

Conclusion

When I increased the keyword density of certain keywords on one of my pages on thefreecountry.com, my page ranking took a big leap upwards. Improving the density of keywords on your pages may also do the same for your site’s search engine position.

If you view the HTML sources for the web pages on the thesitewizard.com, you would have noticed that they all contain META tags. META tags influence the way some search engines list and index web pages.

There are at least three META tags that you will want to use to make sure your page is search engine ready.

What are Meta tags good for?

For search engines that support them, META tags are used in at least three ways:

1. They are used to describe your site in the search results. For example, if you do not have a META Description tag for your page, some search engines will simply grab the first few lines of your page to serve as the description of your site. This description is more important than you may think. If you were searching for “nosuchwordasthis”, which of the following two items listed would you be more likely to click?
   • Nosuchwordasthis.com: Ridiculous and Impossible Words
     Home About Example.com Contact Us Links Download FAQ
   • Nosuchwordasthis.com: Ridiculous and Impossible Words
     Some of the incredible words that netizens have come up with this year, along with their supposed meanings.

   The first item above had a snippet from what appears to be its top menu in the lines below the website title. The second item has a description which tells the person searching exactly what the site is all about.

   If you do not put a description tag, what appears in the listing would be likely to be whatever first appears on your page, usually the alt text of some graphic or banner or perhaps your top menu.

2. There are search engines which also look for a META Robots tag to determine how they index your site. For example, if Google does not encounter such a tag, it will assume that it can index and follow the links on the page. If you want some other behaviour from Google, you will have to use a META tag to specify it.
3. In the old days, they were used to determine which keywords your page will be listed under. So if you want your page to be listed in a search engine when the user searches for the term “nosuchwordasthis”, the latter should be present in your META Keywords tag as well as in your document. I’m not sure however if any search engine still uses this tag today.

There are other META tags, which individual search engines recognize. However, the tags listed here are the main tags relevant to most search engines.

How to Use the META Description Tag

A META Description tag, for those of you who write your web pages using raw HTML code, looks like the following:

Give a brief description of your page in this tag. Bear in mind that this description (or part of it) will be displayed in the search engine results so try to make sure you phrase it in such a way that the person searching can tell at a glance that he’s found the correct page for his search. Minimize irrelevancies and put the essentials near the beginning of the description so that if the search engine only accepts the initial (say) 150 characters, the essential parts of your description will still be displayed.

Not all search engines use this tag. For example, Google normally only displays the text surrounding the matching keyword that the searcher used.

How to Use the META Robots Tag

Although this Meta tag is seldom mentioned in search engine promotion guides, it is important if you want certain search engines to crawl through your website using the links on the page you submit. Since adding it involves little additional effort, you might as well do it while you add the other tags.

In general, you will add the following line to your web page if you want the search engine to index your page and follow the links on it.

In cases where you do not want it to index your page simply use “noindex” instead of “index”. Likewise if you don’t want the engine to crawl through the links on your page, use “nofollow” instead of “follow”.

Most, if not all, search engines today recognize this tag.

Furthermore, if you do not want the search engine to keep a cache of your page on their servers, you can affix a “noarchive” value to the “content” attribute, such as in the example below:

Google, for example, will see the “noarchive” value and not keep a copy of your page in its cache.

How to Use the META Keywords Tag

The Meta Keywords tag used to be an important way to get your page listed under specific keywords under the search engines. Nowadays, however, major search engines like Google and Alta Vista ignore this tag, and the keywords tag no longer has the significance it used to have in the early days of the web. You can read specific details about what is important to these search engines in their ranking of your page in the following articles:

• Google Search Engine Positioning Tips

  http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/google.shtml

• More Tips on Google Search Engine Results Placement

  http://www.thesitewizard.com/sitepromotion/moregoogletips.shtml

• Alta Vista Search Engine Placement Tips

  http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/altavistaranking.shtml

I no longer use this tag on my new pages, since it’s mostly useless nowadays.

The META Keywords tag should be placed in the <head> portion of your web page. If you are using a WYSIWYG editor, there is usually some way for you to enter the keywords on the page using a separate dialog box. If you are typing it yourself into your web page, the tag looks like the following:

In place of the phrase “put your keywords here”, you should of course give a list of your keywords. The keywords should be comma-delimited. That is, if you want to your page to be listed when the user searches for “medical help” and “free diagnosis”, you should use the following tag:

Each search engine has its own limit to the number of characters in your keyword list. The general advice given is not to make your list longer than you need it to be. Some search engine experts recommend that you do not exceed 1000 characters in your list. In the days when it still recognized the keyword tag, Alta Vista did not use anything beyond 500 characters.

A word of caution. Although you might think that this is a good place to put in common misspellings of keywords that you spelt correctly on your page, you should probably note that in the days when search engines indexed the keyword list, some of them penalized web pages that contain words that cannot be found on the page itself. They were probably trying to guard against abuse by people trying to “spam” the index. The latter have been known to dump every conceivable keyword they can think of even if it is unrelated to their web page. Unfortunately, this policy also penalizes legitimate site owners who really want to catch those common misspellings of their page content.

You can read more information about this in the article Your Website’s Spelling and the Search Engines at http://www.thesitewizard.com/sitepromotion/spellingerrors.shtml

You should also not repeat a particular keyword too many times in your tag. Again, some engines used to make a note of such things and penalize your site. Note that it is possible to accidentally repeat a keyword multiple times when you use a word in different phrases: eg, a tag that has the following keyword list, “search engine promotion, search engine ranking, search engine placement”, would have repeated the words “search engine” three times even though they occur in different phrases. Some repetition is apparently acceptable (possibly even up to three times), although excessive repetition is regarded as “spam”.

Practical Guide to Inserting Meta Tags

For those using a visual web editor to manage your site, you may want to check out the following tutorials on how you can actually insert the Meta tags using the editor:

• How to Insert Meta Tags to Your Site in Dreamweaver
• How to Add Meta Tags to Your Website Using Nvu or KompoZer

So how important is the Meta tag?

Although the benefits conferred by using the various meta tags on your page are not substantial, they are nonetheless useful in controlling how the search engines index and list your page. Since tags like the description and robots tag require very little effort to add to your page, it is probably a good idea to add at least these tags to your pages.