SEO techniques for the home enthusiast: Keywords in Your Page's Content

Ranking-wise, search engines tend to pay attention to keywords found within certain tags. These include bold, italics, and bullet (or list) tags. Just remember, if you're bolding, italicizing and bulleting everything, that's the same as emphasizing nothing—because nothing stands out for the rest of the page. So, choose the keywords you want to emphasize carefully. It's important to write naturally as you seamlessly weave your keywords throughout your page content. Don't become so obsessed with keywords density and placement that you make your pages look like they're meant to be read by robots. Remember that writing in a more natural way will also lead to using more variations in your keywords, such as plurals and synonyms, as well as placing your keywords near the type of modifier terms and topically-related terms that people are likely to search for. For example, you might want to target the keywords Palm Springs Timeshare. Writing naturally, you might say something like "Are you looking to buy an affordable Palm Springs Timeshare for your winter vacation?" Since people are known to search in a rather haphazard way, this approach could help you rank for potentially valuable (and less competitive) terms like affordable Palm Springs Timeshare or Palm Springs Timeshare winter. Such modifications to your primary keyword terms often convert better to sales. And they are easier to rank well for than your primary keywords. Many times the best way to discover them is to simply write naturally. In the recent years we've downplayed keyword density because people were becoming overly focused on it. But the fact is that keyword density is still important—just not so much as it once was. Often, people want to know, "What is the exact number of times I should repeat my keywords in order to get high rankings?" The fact is, there isn't an exact number. But you can easily get an idea of the keyword density that a high-ranking competitor is using within your keyword topic with a tool like Keyword Density Analyzer (KDA). We use this tool quite often just to get a ball-park figure when analyzing our competition—especially when optimizing for Yahoo. KDA is actually most valuable for doing keyword density analysis on your competition to see which keywords show up on their pages most often. This can help you learn;

1. which keywords your competitors are targeting, and
2. help discover potentially valuable keywords you may have overlooked.

Combined with WordTracker, we find KDA to be an invaluable tool for doing keyword research. We also use KDA to find terms related to our primary keywords. Many search engines (including Google) use a technology called latent semantic indexing to group keywords into related families. We won't go into the details here, but the important point is that by also including keywords related to your primary keywords, you help make your pages seem more relevant for those primary keywords. So how do you hunt down those related keywords? Google Sets is a great tool for this purpose. It gives you a pretty accurate idea of what keywords Google judges to be related to your main keywords. Not all keywords produce great results, but many do. Another useful option is Google's synonym search. This search requires that you precede each keywords with a tilde (~). Use Google's negative keyword filter to remove the actual keyword itself, so you'll just get synonyms. For example, ~guitar -guitar. This can turn up some synonyms, but works poorly for multi-word phrases. Google Sets is a much easier approach.