I’m starting to put together a few guides to help shatter some of the myths about Search Engine Optimisation.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases are what people type into search engines.  It follows that if your site is understood by the search engines to have a lot of ‘answers’ relavant to the person doing the search, you’re more likely to be higher in the search rankings, and hence there’s more chance they’ll click through to you.

Keyword density is a measure of how many times your targeted keyword or keyphrase is being used in the content of your web page.

By repeating your important keyword – or keyword phrase, your increase the prominence of those words to the search engines. This will help the search engines to identify your target keyword and rank the web page accordingly.

However, search engines aren’t daft; they penalise sites (by ranking them lower) if they keyword-stuff or use the same keyword phrase too many times in an unnatural way.

Repeating identical keywords or phrases for more than three times in the body of the the page may actually damage than good as far as the search engine algorithm is concerned.  There is an optimum level you should aim for.  You should also aim to use words with similar meaning – just like when you write naturally. Search engines are smart enough to recognise synonyms and variations such as man, men, male, boy, boys, masculine and etc.

In each page, focus on one or two keywords but not more than three keywords so that it is apparent to the search engine what your page is about.

Keyword Positioning

As much as possible, use the keyword or keyword phrase in the heading of the page, in the first sentence of the first paragraph and near the bottom of the page.  Bold or <header>  tagged keywords help, too.

As a rule of thumb, your most important keywords – the exact phrase should not be repeated for more than 3% of the total word count. If you have a 500 words page, keep the keywords count to less than 15 times.