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In this month's issue:
In this month's issue: Thoughts on the use of keywords in websites.
Customer of the month - Woof, Bark (you'll understand later).
Please pass on Thoughts of the Gurus to people in your network.
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Word count for that issue: 1100 words
Approximate time to read: About 5 minutes
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Keywords on your Websites
One of the things we don't seem to have much of these days is time.
Everyone rushes everywhere and communication is compressed into
new shorter forms like all of the text messages I receive, still
don't get all of the various abbreviations. There is a danger that this
short, fast communication is carried over into web sites that we develop.
All short, bulleted points lacking any grammar or sentence
construction, and as I have said before search engines seem to like
well-constructed grammatical sentences.
However, there is another knock-on effect of shortening text and
that is the effect it has on key words. I am not really talking
about the meta tag keywords here, but the words in the text that
the search engines find multiple times. That is often known as
key word density i.e. what percentage of the text is taken up by
a single word or multi-word phrase. Have you ever considered
this in writing your own code? Have you ever thought yourself very
clever, by managing to get 100 instances of your key word in one
A4 page?
Having your keywords and phrases sprinkled throughout the text is
obviously good, but how can you ensure that you don't overdo it. Well,
one way is to spend time creating a more lengthy piece of well-written
text. This will mean that although you still have lots of key words
and phrases in there, their relative density is reduced because of
the greater overall volume of text.
We have a number of domains that we run purely to test theories on
topics like key word density. By creating multiple pages with
similar overall information, but written differently, we can
test how the different search engines treat different key word
densities. Just a note of warning, don't try this at home. You
can actually be sandboxed (your site held in limbo) for having
duplicate pages on a single domain. So being able to calculate
how similar pages are to one another is important when doing
this.
Finally, just a word on meta tag keywords. The importance attached
by search engines to keywords specified in the meta tag has greatly
reduced due to the overuse of this feature. Many sites I have looked at
have tried to use the same keywords over and ever over again. Our advice
is to choose these words carefully and use maybe 4 or 5, but don't
go over board. Then try and use the keywords throughout the actual page
text, but without forcing the density. After all, if they really are
your key words, then use of them in text should come naturally.
And now our poem
Written by my partner, reflecting web page writing techniques.
If we write half a page
Then you write thirty four
I can use three keywords
whilst you get forty more
I can be brief and concise
to speedily spit pages out
but your one and only masterpiece
Carries far more clout,
I am but my comic strip
for your Tolstoyan drama
I am all wild excitement
whilst you are perfect karma,
I have few words to play with
to juggle in a subtle key
whilst you have an epic
to aid keyword density
the old bull takes his time
never rushing, always serene
he has created multiple options
whilst young bull was over keen,
so when thee code your pages
don’t undersell your wording
or you'll be virtually alone
when you should be herding,
ten keywords in a thousand
dilutes the trend to oversell
and makes the reader relax
from the instinct he can tell
that a little page is but a ploy
to put him onto a sales hook,
whereas your interesting article
is worth a second look.
And for those who wondered about the Poet Laureate's comments, here's the one that Philip Larkin liked, it's called Voles
I'd hate to be a sparrow, or a tortoise or a mole
wombat or an opossum
but id love to be a vole
cos they are kind of cute
and voles have furry feet
they don’t get squashed or trodden on
or shot for humans meat
voles are kind of hip
in a rodent sort of way
so I'm going to take some time out
To be a vole today.
The Gurus Helpful Hint
Keep your site alive. If you were a spiderbot, let's face it
their lives aren't that exciting, would you want to visit the
same old code week after boring week. As Marvin the paranoid android
says in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when asked about
having to park cars "The first 10 million years are the worst,
after that the next ten million years, etc." So try to make some changes to
your site on a regular basis and keep these bots interested.
Consider adding your whole new page and rewriting some text about
your company that is a bit out of date. Interest from the bots
equals a better SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) position which
should eventually mean more business.
Customer of the Month
Every single month we will endeavour to bring you a “Customer of
the Month”, a successful site which you can visit and compare
to what you may have in mind for the future yourselves.
This month, it is the
Dogs Crates and Cages website
They provide high quality, affordable crates and cages for dogs
and other pets. Besides transportation, the crates can be used
as part of a puppy training regime. Woof, Bark.
If you have any comments about our ezine
(good or bad) please contact me.
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unsubscribe in the title.
On a lighter note, watch out there are teddy bears about.
Each month we are including an adventure from the legendary
Stiffsteiffs Teddy Bears
So for September
we bring you, at great personal cost
http://www.stiffsteiffs.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/mcqueen.htm
have fun, but beware these are bears with attitude.
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