back

Optimize copy

The visible text (copy) in a page is very important. Search engines look at a number of things to determine if a page is relevant for a search and all the things they find in the copy have a big influence. This article will describe briefly how to optimize the copy in your web pages.

Keyword density gives an idea to the search engines of what a page is about. A text that repeats a keyword phrase many times will most likely be very relevant. The number of times that a keyword phrase shows up in the copy divided by the total amount of words is known as the keyword density.

SEO consultants have different opinions of what the best keyword density is. Some say 3 to 6%, others say it should be 10 to 30%. This is mainly caused by how keyword density is calculated. Some include the title and meta description tag and then take the average. Others just look at the copy. In this article we look at just the copy and not at any of the meta tags or other places where keywords can be placed. These other places are described in the article: optimize html code.

Keyword density should be 2 to 8 %. It really depends on the subject to know what is the right keyword density. A rule of thumb is: If an uninformed reader does not notice that a specific keyword or phrase is repeated over and over again, it is fine. It has to make sense!

Best is to target just 1 keyword phrase per page. But if you don’t have many pages and still want to focus on more phrases you can target more than 1 phrase per page. But the absolute maximum is 3. Targeting more phrases basically means spreading relevancy: Let’s say a page can receive points on a scale of 1 to 10 for relevancy. When you target 1 phrase, that phrase can get a maximum of 10 points. When you target 2 phrases, each phrase can get 5 points maximum.

After you wrote the copy you need to work on emphasizing your keyword phrase in order to give them extra influence. This can be done by making them bold, adding titles to paragraphs, etc. For a reader it makes it easier to find out what the page is about. And that is exactly how a search engine looks at it too. So it is important not to exaggerate it. To give an example: Emphasizing the whole text by making it all bold does not work. Emphasized words are compared to the copy in the page, not to the copy in other pages or web sites.

How to emphasize is described in the article:optimize html code.