Once you have analyzed both your own website and your competition, you can move forward to actually working on your website, the first step is producing content. Copywriting is a skill, and if you do not possess it you should hire an accomplished copywriter. Beware of ‘SEO ‘ writers, as they often use keyword stuffing tactics. You want a copywriter who understands SEO, and write fluid, readable copy, not someone who has learned to string keywords together but is not a god writer. You don’t want your visitors to leave in disgust because your website is not readable!

To start, review the list of keywords you have compiled for each page to optimize your website. Begin by slowly and steadily developing relevant content for each page. Your content should be SEO friendly, conversant, easy to read, informative and able to answer your visitors’ questions and concerns.

Keyword density is a term thrown about and constantly misunderstood. Your website’s keyword density should be neither too high nor too low. The ‘right’ keyword density to be maintained depends on the average density throughout your website, the word count, and the type pf page you are building. Regarding how the keyword density is calculated, many people find confusion here as well. The best method to use to calculate keyword density is as follows

For every 100 words, use your keyword once (for regular web pages and articles). In cases of sales copy or ad copy, density can be tighter, as well as on pages with images where keywords can also be used in text/captions to increase density and explain the images to search engines which can only see text.

Some webmasters used to think that the more keywords you could stuff into each page, the better. This led to gibberish in the web, and Google among others promptly started penalizing for ‘keyword stuffing’. Now the 1 to 100 rule (1% density) works best, although some webmasters still prefer a 2-3 % density.

Understanding how to smoothly implement keywords and maintain a steady density without losing track of readability can be tricky, but the key thing to remember is that you have 2 kinds of readers on your webpage. First, you must take into account that search engines look at web pages much differently than the human viewers. They rely on keywords and tags to learn what the page is about, and it is important that we make the relevance of our page perfectly clear.

The second type of visitor is of course the human one, the consumer looking for answers. You will find that keywords help them as well, but above all your content needs to be able to catch and hold their attention while informing them, educating them, and ultimately convincing them to convert into customers of your product or service.

Search engines calculate keyword density in a particular way, and you can find that out in the next post. In the meantime,. Concentrate on creating great content that focuses on what you can do for the reader, and you can always tighten up your keyword density later if it is absolutely necessary to increase your density. Once you write with SEO in mind, you will naturally place keywords in your text, and satisfy both spiders and humans.

wordpress.com/2009/06/keyword-cloud.png?w=450&h=291″ alt=”See full size image” width=”167″ height=”131″ /> Spiders Need Keywords! Feed the Spider!