In the previous articles you defined the exact keywords to optimize for each of your pages. It's now time to enter the core of the optimization process. This process is about populating the contents of the Web site with your best keyword discoveries in such a way that the search spider will consider your keyword-focused content as relevant and, just as importantly, not see your efforts as spam. Remember the golden rule: if you make your content sound organic to the human visitor, it will not seem like spam to the search spider either. After you perform the optimization, open your pages in a browser and read them as if you were an outside visitor. Does the keyword presence seem far-fetched, annoying or funny in spots? If so, you are entering a dangerous game with the spiders. The same concerns your keyword and description META tags. Read your META description as if you were reading some other company's site in a Web catalog. If it sounds odd or has unnecessary word repetition, you should change it. If not, then everything is OK. At the same time, spiders do not possess a human's intelligence. They are machines and need to be approached as such. This approach dictates the exact means and criteria for you to measure the optimality of your Web content before you disclose it to the spiders. These criteria are called Prominence, Density, Frequency, and Proximity. Keyword Prominence Prominence is a measure of keyword importance that indicates how close a keyword is to the beginning of the analyzed page area (e.g. page title). If some word is used at the beginning of the title, headings, or close to the beginning of the visible text of the page, it is considered more important than other words. Prominence is calculated separately for each important page area. HTML markup lets you emphasize certain document areas against the others. The most important items are placed at the top, and their importance is gradually reduced towards the bottom. Keyword prominence works much the same way. Usually, the closer a keyword to the top of a page and to the beginning of a sentence, the higher its prominence is. However, search engines also check if the keyword is present in the middle and at the bottom of the page, and you should be aware of that. 100% prominence is given to a keyword or keyphrase that appears at the beginning of the analyzed page area. The keyword/keyphrase in the middle of the analyzed area will have 50% prominence. Let's imagine our key phrase is "Office furniture" and look at the following examples of possible titles we could give to our pages: 1. Furniture Market – Office furniture at affordable prices 2. Office furniture at affordable prices – FurnitureMarket.com The second title will definitely do better for "Office furniture" since the prominence of our key phrase is 100% (this word combination goes from the very beginning), while in the first example it's only around 60%. The importance of keyword prominence is illustrated by the following example: A search on Google for "Digital Camera", shows the following result for the top rank - Digital Camera Reviews and News: Digital Photography Review ... Current digital photography news, digital camera reviews, articles and discussion forums. As you see, the word combination "Digital camera" has a 100% prominence in the page title. Keyword weight / keyword density These two parameters are used as synonyms, although there's a slight mathematical difference between them. However, in this course both terms will refer to one and the same indicator - a measure of the percentage of keywords to the general number of words on a page. The results on the SERP (search engine result page) are ranked, in part, based on the percentage of words on a page that are similar to the words used in the query. When keyword density is artificially inflated, it is called "keyword stuffing" and is considered spam by all search engines. In other words, keyword density, or weight, is a measure of how often a keyword is found in a specific area of the Web page like a title, heading, anchor name, visible text, etc. against all other words. Unlike keyword frequency, which is just a count, keyword density is a ratio which depends on the type of keyword, i.e. if the keyword consists of a single word, its density within some context will be lower than if it consisted of two words or a phrase. Density is calculated as the number of words in the key phrase multiplied by frequency and divided by the total number of words (including the keyword). So, to increase the keyword density, you should either add some more keywords or reduce the number of words in the page area. The proportion of the keywords to all words will become larger, so will the keyword density. Let's assume we're optimizing for "long-range weather forecast software" and look at the following title examples: 1. Weather Screen: long-range weather forecast software 2. Weather Screen is a long-range weather forecast software that shows weather forecasts and daily horoscopes on your desktop In terms of keyword density, the first title is much more profitable: the keyword density there approaches 65%, while in the second one it hardly reaches 40%. In the BODY text of the page, keyword density is almost never this high. The recommended density for body text is 3-7% for each keyword you optimize for that page. (remember that each page should generally be optimized for no more the three keywords or phrases). This means that every keyword or keyphrase should repeat 3-7 times for every 100 words. By excluding the stop words like "a", "and", "for", "at", "to" (generally, all auxiliary parts of speech – prepositions, articles, and conjunctions), you increase the weight of your keywords. Keyword frequency Frequency is the number of times your keyword is used in the analyzed area of the page. Unlike density, it does not depend on the total number of words on your page– it's an absolute index. If you repeat your key phrase 7 times, your frequency will be 7, no matter if your page has 7,000 words or only these keywords 7 times and nothing more. Search engines use frequency as another measure of keyword importance. Pages with more keywords will be rated as more relevant results, and as such get higher rankings. However, using too many keywords is considered "keyword stuffing" (as well as excessive attempts to artificially increase your keyword density), and most search engines will penalize you for this practice. It is known as the oldest spammer's technique to artificially inflate rankings. To see how frequency influences rankings, do a search on Google for any competitive and generalized keyword. In our case, it is "design" and the first result on Google goes: Design Museum : London - design, architecture and fashion. London 's museum of international contemporary design. We see that keyword frequency in title is 2 and it is repeated in the extract from the body text. Keyword proximity Some engines, such as Google, use the concept of "keyword proximity" as part of their ranking formulas. "Keyword proximity" refers to how close keywords that make your key phrase are to each other. Remember our advice to optimize for a phrase that consists of more than one word. You should try to use your keyword combination as a unit, keeping your keywords together; however it's not always possible to sound natural by rigidly sticking to this rule. In these cases, try to put your keywords as close together as possible and make sure your sentences are clear. International Widgets Inc is selling electronic widgets for 7 years. International Widgets is a company that specializes in electronic devices, widgets and other stuff... You see that we try to use words "electronic" and "widgets" close to each other in the text so the spiders will understand we are targeting people who seek these kinds of widgets. The logic of the search engine is such that if the words follow each other as they are typed in the search box, chances are these words are relevant. If they all appear in one paragraph, then the page is possibly relevant.The use of this is perhaps most obvious with Google due to the way they usually provide a description. Google will normally provide "quotes" from the text of a page that contain the keywords. For instance, let's search Google for "Web design". One of the top results has the following description: "Learn good web page design by looking at bad web pages…" Notice the proximity of the words "web" and design (together with the frequency of "web"). It's time to move on to the next lesson where we describe the critical page elements where these parameters should be controlled. read more articles at www.webuniver.com