It is best to have your most relevant keywords appear in the first paragraph of the page. Search engines give more weight to text closer to the top.



Practical Example: A website offering printing services in the San Diego area, should begin the first paragraph of the homepage with “San Diego printing company” instead of “Welcome to Joe's Print Shop.” Nothing against Joe, but a lot less people will search for “Joe's print shop” than “San Diego printing.”

Having your first paragraph optimized for your relevant keywords, doesn't mean that you should to stuff it with keywords. Instead, write a catchy introduction that contains the right words relevant to the page.

More is not better. Web pages with high keyword density may be damaging your chances of good search engine ranking. Keyword density in the entire body text area should be less than 2% for a keyword phrase that your page should rank high. High keyword density could result in penalties resulting your web page lose precious positions.

Use Keywords in Text Links

Search engines love links, and they pay close attention to the text within links. The significance of links on your site and on external sites linking to your site is evaluated based on the words within the link.

Practical Example: A link pointing to your site containing your relevant keyword is radically more effective than a link that states: “click here.” A website that links to your San Diego print shop should include “san diego print shop” within the body of the link.

Search engines consider hyper linked text within the body of the page text important. The key to effective links is to include your keywords within the anchor text. The anchor text is the area of the link users click to follow the link.

Make Navigation Search Engine Friendly

The best site navigation system works well for humans and search engines. You site navigation architecture should enable search engines to easily crawl all of your pages. Web designers that disregard the importance of search engine optimization use frames that cause critical problems with search engines. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus are tell tale signs of ignorant designers because both technologies are invisible to search engines. By now, you understand that the last thing you want is for your site to be invisible to search engines.

If you absolutely must use graphics, flash, or java script for navigation, be sure there are html links somewhere on the page to help search engine spiders crawl your pages.