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What is Search Engine Optimization/Optimisation (SEO)?

The correct term is “Search Engine Marketing” (SEM), the term “optimization” is used mostly when we refer to how a Web page is ranked. Each page is given a score based on several elements on the page’s structure and how many votes a page has received.

The Structure of your HTML Web page is very important when it comes to typing your explanations about any particular topic / niche your Web site is about.

The first rule of thumb is to always include a H1 tag at the beginning of each Web page.

The H1 tag is the header Subject tag, and classed as one of the most important elements a search engine looks for to determine what your Web page document is about, amoungst other factors. The H1 tag should always contain your primary keyword, a phrase that will be used
by other users of Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

The position of the Keyword should be at the beginning of every H1 tag, only use H1 Tags once, using more than one H1 tag on the Web page will confuse the search engine in understanding the main importance of its use. When you want to empathsize another paragraph, use a H2 tag
instead. Rather than using the same Keyword in the H2 tag, use a related keyword term instead.

The position of your keywords in your H1 tag are very important, this is referred to as “Keyword Proximity & Prominence”, Proximity; where the word is placed. Prominence; how well it stands out from the rest.

Example: To calculate the prominence of each of your targeted keywords, we need to take into consideration how many words there are on a particular line before the period / full stop (.). Or how many words in the H1 tag, or Title Tag of our Web pages.

Let’s assume we had a H1 tag as follows:

“Dog Kennels, choosing The Right One”

And “Dog Kennels” proximity is extremely high as it’s at the beginning of our title.

The prominence of the Keyword “Dog Kennels” is calculated by taking the total number of words.
Even though there are 6 words there, in actual fact there are 5. But we still use the 6 words in our calculation.

“Dog Kennels” = 1 Keyword
“Choosing” = 1
“The” = 1

and so on.

Here’s how we calcuate the prominence of a keyword phrase.

Our keyword prhase contains two words “Dog Kennel”, and it appears once.

2×1

and divide this total by the total words, in this case, 6.

2×1/6

which gives us 0.333% recurring.

Then times it by 100%

2×1 / 6 x 100% = 33.33%

This would seem the correct approach, well, the calcuations is, but here’s where MOST people get the calculations wrong.

You see, search engines do not count words like; a, the, if, we, so. And so on. These are referred to as STOP WORDS. They are words of no meaning, so they are stricken from the caculations.

To understand where I am coming from, type in “Dog Kennels choosing the right one” in the Google Search engine. Notice how “Dog kennels choosing right one” are the ONLY words that is hyperlinked and the word “the” isn’t, it’s in bold instead. That’s because Google Doesn’t consider it an actual word of significance.

So the correct caculation would be:

2×1 / 5 x 100% = 40%

40% would be your keyword prominence weight total.

A lot of people these days feel that keyword density on a Web page is a big factor, well, it used to be, nowadays since the search engine’s are increasingly trying to work out new ways to determine what a web page is about, like back in the old days they counted the total words on the page and see how many occurrences a keyword search phrases would appear, this lead to manipulation of the search engine results so Google has incorporated what is referred to as LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). It doesn’t involve the count of how many words appear on a page to determine what the page is about, but rather how many other related symantic words there are; synonyms.

SEO Website Builder Pro does all the calculations for you and inserts them in the H1 tag, and the Title tag for you.