Blog > Keyword Placement
David Dougherty has a great post at One Degree on developing your keyword strategy, (part two). David provides an extensive process for choosing your keywords, phrases and deciding how to structure your pages most effectively.
It's not only important what you say on your web page but it's also very important where you place content within the page. Specifically, where you place it within the HTML code. Search engines such as Google place value on content within a web page based on whether it occurs at the top of a page or farther down. Additionally, the HTML tag that the keyword is within may influence the way in which it ranks the words contained within it.
For instance, placing content within the "title" tag gives it the highest ranking of all-content within your page from the search engine's perspective. Following that, placing content in an "h1" tag will garner a much higher value than if it were placed within a styled "p" tag or "div" tag. Google naturally assumes that content marked as a header is more important than content marked as a paragraph and subsequently content within a title tag is more important than anything within a header tag. Beyond important tags such as titles and headers Google basically ranks content at the top of the page source higher than content that is lower within the page. It has been suggested anecdotally that Google places further emphasis "strong" tags.
It's also worth noting that search engines can change the way in which they analyse pages at any time. At one time it was quite useful to make use of the "meta" tags to provide hidden keywords that would help search engines optimize for page content. Unfortunately the spam community abused the feature by aggressively populating meta tags with misleading information to generate traffic. The merit of that approach is best left for another discussion but the result is that few search engines utilize the meta tag making is effectively useless.
Strong keyword strategies combined with a program to generate inbound links are your first lines of attack. But implementing these simple placement guidelines will help you get the most mileage out of your keywords.
It's not only important what you say on your web page but it's also very important where you place content within the page. Specifically, where you place it within the HTML code. Search engines such as Google place value on content within a web page based on whether it occurs at the top of a page or farther down. Additionally, the HTML tag that the keyword is within may influence the way in which it ranks the words contained within it.
For instance, placing content within the "title" tag gives it the highest ranking of all-content within your page from the search engine's perspective. Following that, placing content in an "h1" tag will garner a much higher value than if it were placed within a styled "p" tag or "div" tag. Google naturally assumes that content marked as a header is more important than content marked as a paragraph and subsequently content within a title tag is more important than anything within a header tag. Beyond important tags such as titles and headers Google basically ranks content at the top of the page source higher than content that is lower within the page. It has been suggested anecdotally that Google places further emphasis "strong" tags.
It's also worth noting that search engines can change the way in which they analyse pages at any time. At one time it was quite useful to make use of the "meta" tags to provide hidden keywords that would help search engines optimize for page content. Unfortunately the spam community abused the feature by aggressively populating meta tags with misleading information to generate traffic. The merit of that approach is best left for another discussion but the result is that few search engines utilize the meta tag making is effectively useless.
Strong keyword strategies combined with a program to generate inbound links are your first lines of attack. But implementing these simple placement guidelines will help you get the most mileage out of your keywords.
Posted by Michael Glenn on Monday, November 6, 2006 at 10:00 AM in Marketing, HTML/CSS with tags keyword, html, seachengine • Permalink • 1 comment
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Don't forget that using your keywords in the inbound text link is very important to the search engines. For example we are an Internet marketing company and are would tag it as shown in this example.