Yes I am accustomed to those tags, just thought you meant the very top header. I guess I should reorganise as I have a lot of h1,h2 tags which I assume will cause each one to carry less weight? Also, what will happen if I delete a lot of the content and cut it shorter. I'm afraid I'll lose ranking if I do that? Very helpful Scottscd, cheers mate.
It does dilute the strength slightly yes. If you're having trouble ranking top for a competitive term you may have to target the page more towards fewer keyphrases which will give more strength to each one. I really doubt the rankings will change for your target keywords providing the keyword density stays the same. The optimal density for your major keywords/phrases is about 7-9%. After this it's just relevent backlinks you need to push your site to the top.
So keyword ranking is more dependent on keyword density as opposed to the number of times the keyword appears on the page. Say if the keyword appeared 100 times but the density was only 1% would that outrank a site with a keyword at 7% which only appears 40 times? Also, if I do link exchanges with similar sites, would it still be worth doing even if those particular sites do not have any page rank and have little weight whatsoever? I mean is it worth giving an outbound link to these sites if I don't get much in return? Cheers again
Density is the only factor which an be properly measured because it relates to the page. Keyword density is basically how many times the keyword appears on the page, but in relation to the rest of the text. Keyword density is a part of it but not as important as other SEO factors. You still need to optimise for it though so every part add's up to a well optimised page. Reciprocal links are usually a waste of time really. They give some link juice but it's severely reduced compared to a one-way link. I'd only recommend doing these kinds of deals if it's a very popular related website and every other means of getting one-way links from the site are exhausted. Don't waste your time gaining reciprocal links with low PR/popularity/relevency websites.
Thanks again. I'm scared of my site going down the rankings. How do I prevent this? Does google care if content is not added frequently? What other reasons would cause it to go down the list? Another thing, how well is link juice passed on from domain homepage to deeper links? I only really advertise my homepage, will this cause me problems in the future? Also, when adding a category on wordpress there is a description which is optional. Where does this description go and is it beneficial adding keywords here? Cheers