Search engine optimisation, or SEO as it’s commonly referred to, has been the backbone that has carried web sites to success over and over again for years. It is still very important, but with the hundreds of social bookmarking sites now coming on stream, it is not the only way.

SEO is about onpage and offpage factors. Most people understand the onpage factors better, and will use the page’s main keyword in the page title, in the first H1 tag, in the first paragraph, preferably in the first sentence, and sprinkled throughout the page content to a density of around five percent.

There are other factors too, but in a nutshell that’s it. Of course, the trick is to do all this and make the page readable to humans. Not only readable, but interesting as well. This is not achieved every time, unfortunately.

In her article at http://learn.wordtracker.com/articles/stop-the-slaughter-of-innocent-copy/, Karon Thackston puts it succinctly by demonstrating how not to insert your keyword in an awkward and unreadable way. Can you guess what the main keyword is?

“If you are looking for Spanish villas vacations, search our site for the best deals in Spanish villas. No other Spanish villas site has the selection of premium Spanish villas with the most sought after locations that we have. View some of our Spanish villas pictures or take virtual tours of our Spanish villas today.”

SEO has, in many cases, become a “thing” that people just do. Often they don’t know why, not really, and that just makes it worse. Bad content is bad content, whether or not it has the keyword inserted a perfect five percent of the time or not.

Better then, to write good content and let the keyword density take care of itself. You may be surprised at how close to the arbitrary optimum it actually is. But more importantly, it will be good content. People will be able to read and enjoy it, and even understand it too.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 5:24 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.