Optimizing Your Website (on-page factors)...Continued
Content
The main content of your web page should aim to have a certain keyword density. This is the amount of times a particular keyword appears in the text when compared to the total number of words in the text. Generally, you should aim for a density between 3% and 6%. Anything less and your web page may not be considered relevant to the search term - any more than that and the search engines might penalize your site for keyword loading (or keyword stuffing).
The important thing to remember is to keep your content sounding natural and relevant to the topic. Don't include your keywords just to increase the keyword density; you don't want your content to sound artificial.
The opening paragraph of your page should contain your keyword at least once. This is also true for the final, or closing, paragraph on the page.
Don't spend too much time with on-page optimizations. You're best to just do the optimizations when you first create the page and then forget about it. You are not likely to gain any additional benefit from constantly modifying your on-page optimizations. You will just be wasting your time.
Advanced Tip
It is best if the search engines read your main keywords right away, so you would ideally place them as close to the top of the page as possible. This is not always as simple as it seems, depending on how you create your webpage (if you outsource your webpage development, you may not have any control over this, but you should be aware of the following technique so you can instruct your page developer to do it this way).
For years, the easiest way to create webpages - and the way most marketers tell others to do it - was by using HTML tables (via the <table> tag). This method gives you a nice column effect on your website so you can have something like a navigation bar along one side of your page.
The problem with this approach is that you have no control over how the search engine spiders will read your tables. If you have a page header with a navigation bar along the left side of your page and the content on the right side, the spiders will likely read the header and navigation bar before ever reaching your content. This is bad.
Instead of using HTML tables to create your webpage, you should use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). So, instead of using the standard <table> tags, you wrap your sections (header, navigation bar, content, etc…) using a tag called a div (via the <div> tag). You then use CSS to control the positioning as well as the style of each div section.
This allows you to have all your content at the very beginning of your webpage and other sections such as the header and navigation to be included at the bottom. So, the first thing the search engines will read is the content of your webpage, which contains your main keywords. Remember, the content only appears at the beginning of the page within the HTML code. By using CSS you can make the header appear at the very top and the navigation appear to the left or right, the same way it would look using tables.
Note: This website was created using CSS - absolutely no tables were used. So you see what can be done.
Developing webpages and using CSS is out of scope for this section, but it was important to mention it so you're aware of the impact. If you want to learn more about CSS you can simply type 'CSS tutorial' into any search engine. There are plenty of free resources available on the Internet.
Outgoing Links
The final on-page optimization you can make to your website involves creating links that link to some authority site related to your niche. Be sure to include your main keywords in the text of the link.
Don't go too crazy with this step. DO NOT create hundreds of links to other sites because it will nott help you. In fact, it will end up hurting your site. However, there's no problem with including a small number of outgoing links if they're related to your content.
You don't want to have too many outgoing links on your site without having as many incoming links as well. The search engines give a far greater importance to the number of incoming links than outgoing links (we'll cover this in the next section).
