strongDensity and Prominence/strong
pKeyword density is a measure of how much emphasis (weight) a
keyword is given within the content of a page. Most of the emphasis
of a page is assigned to the text at the start of the page, at the
end of the page and within these tags: lt;titlegt;, lt;h1gt;,
lt;agt;, lt;img alt="" /gt;, lt;stronggt; and lt;emgt; (up
to 3 or 4 times)./p
pNever waste a precious strong/em tag on content that isnrsquo;t
a bunch of keywords. You can use CSS to achieve any visual effect
you want. You should only use those tags to put emphasis on a
keyword/key-phrase./p
pKeyword prominence is a measure of how important a word is
within its context ndash; in other words, how close it is to the
beginning of the sentence. E.g.: the word lsquo;carrsquo; is more
prominent in lsquo;car sale Londonrsquo; (at the start) than in
lsquo;London car salersquo; (at the end)./p
pKeyword prominence and density are 2 concepts applied to every
aspect of your website: URLs, headings, keywords, links, etc. Keep
these 2 ideas in mind as you read through the rest of this article
ndash; they apply to absolutely everything./p
strongKeywords/Key-phrases/strong
pA keyword is any word that accurately describes your content. A
key-phrase is a combination of keywords./p
pStop words are those considered too lsquo;commonrsquo; or
lsquo;vaguersquo;, which are ignored in search terms (with
exceptions, but letrsquo;s leave it at that for this article). You
may think theyrsquo;re harmless since theyrsquo;re ignored, but
stop words can be seriously damage your SEO strategy by occupying a
huge amount of keyword density and prominence within key-phrases in
titles, headings, URLs, links, etchellip; Example:/p
p style="margin-left: 36pt;"Car sales in London = car sales has
50% density, 100% prominence Car sales London = car sales has 66%
density, 100% prominence London car sales = car sales has 66%
density, 66% prominence/p
pWhen writing up key-phrases, try to write in a newspaper
headline style and miss out common words such as lsquo;thersquo;,
lsquo;arsquo;, lsquo;onrsquo;, lsquo;of, lsquo;inrsquo;,
lsquo;yoursquo;, lsquo;mersquo;, lsquo;hersquo;,
lsquo;itrsquo;, etchellip;/p
pPS.: There are too many stop words in the English language so I
wonrsquo;t put a list here, but I do have a list if anyone wants
it./p
strongKeyword Ambiguity/strong
pSearch engines are aware of these ambiguities so you'd only be
shooting yourself in the foot if you tried to cover both. Take
"a href=
"http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=enamp;sa=Xamp;oi=spellamp;resnum=0amp;ct=resultamp;cd=1amp;q=xmas+trees+deliveredamp;spell=1"
target="_blank"xmas trees delivered/a " and "a href=
"http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=enamp;q=christmas+trees+deliveredamp;btnG=Searchamp;meta="
target="_blank"christmas trees delivered/a " for example. The
word ixmas/i never appears the site's content, but
pinesandneedles.com still ranks top for either of these 2 search
phrases. I find this difficult to explain, but here's why:i(using
xmas, christmas and some imaginary numbers)/i/p
p style="margin-right: 36pt; margin-left: 36pt;"uWhen you are
strict and avoid ambiguity:/u Let's say that you only use
"christmas" throughout the site, it ends up with a prominance of
10. (ijust some number to illustrate this example/i ). When a
user searches for something with the word "xmas", the search
engines will consider both "xmas" and "christmas" equaliy, so you
end up being a very likely match for their search.br
br
uWhen you go with the flow and cover every possibility:/u Let's
say you've used the words 'xmas' and 'christmas' equaly thorought
the website and they each end up with prominance 5. (ijust some
number to illustrate this example, but smaller than the number on
the previous example/i ) When a user searches for something with
the word "xmas", the search engines will consider both "xmas" and
"christmas", but you are not as likely to match either, because
you've distributed the prominence between 2 phrases./p
pWhen it comes to ambiguous words, it's always best to leave the
search engines to deal with it their own way. Just do your bit by
being clear and consistent./p