Candles of Eden wants all of you out there selling SoyLuscious® scented candles to have the most effective sites helping you sell your products online. So, we’ve decided to create an SEO Primer just for you. Each Thursday we’ll cover a new topic in an effort to help you make the most of your websites.
We’re going to start with the basics, namely, the 3 main criteria the search engines use to rank your pages: the relevance, popularity and freshness of your content. This week, we’ll cover relevance.
We spoke last week about how people work online…they usually log on with a specific purpose in mind. Because of this, the search engines tailor results to them. When a user searches for a phrase, it looks for the most relevant results in can find, which it determines in part by how frequently that phrase is used in the content it finds online.
The algorithm the search engines use is not known to the public, and it changes frequently to keep people from “gaming” the system and giving themselves an artificially high result. (For that reason, the number one strategy for SEO is to provide the kind of content your customers are looking for) But as it stands now, a keyword density of 2%-3% seems to be the sweet spot. And to really improve your results, include the phrase in your title, 2%-3% of your body copy, at least once as an H1 header tag, and again in the footer of the page. Following this formula should leave the search engines no doubt what your page is about.
And since each page of your site is indexed separately, you have multiple opportunities to optimize your site for different keyword phrases.
The tricky part can be creating optimized content that engages and compels your customers. The best bet is always to find out what they are searching for, and then providing content relevant to that search. THEN go back and make sure your relevant copy has the right keyword density.
Remember, your writing for your audience, not for the search engines. You just want to make it easy for the emgines to put your content in front of the right people. Stay tuned for next week’s Candles of Eden SEO Primer.
2 users commented in " Candles of Eden SEO Primer: Content Relevance "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackLove this series. I can’t wait for more! If we have a page which 500 words, how many of those words should be keyword phrases?
Jessica,
Hi! Sorry I’m just now responding. Based on the 2%-3% guideline, then a 500-word page needs to have the phrase about 10 times. 15 if you can, but if it starts sounding forced, then don’t push it.
An easy way to slip the keywords in is to include them in subheads, and try to have a subhead every 100 words or so (using subheads is a good idea to break up big blocks of text anyway, to make it easier to read online).
Hope this helps!