I have decided to write this article about keywords, because some webmasters seem to underestimate the value of correctly written content. Search engines have to decide and refer your site into some category, sub-category, and sub-sub category (and so on, if they can). For example, if you are selling hookahs, your site will probably be categorized as "middle-east", "hookahs" and maybe some other niches.

This is done, because modern search engines want to know, which sites of those, linking to you, are from a related topic. Related links carry much more "weight" – increasing your position in search results more, than a non-related link would.

The only way, that search engines can categorize your site, is recognizing words in your site. What words appear in more percentage, what words are in 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so on places. So, as a webmaster, you have to realize, that it is your duty to carefully pick those words.

Titles, headers, text – it all has to be in your niche, and contain keywords, that you think relate to your topic. For example, general hookahs store will contain words like "hookah", "sheesha", "charcoals", "tobacco" and so on. According to those keywords, search engine will try to understand what this site is about, and calculate its rating. But please, be aware, that "keyword stuffing" (putting too much keywords in text) can hurt you. Proposed keyword density is about 3-4% of the text.

There is a great tool, called Google Webmaster, that helps you analyze your keyword density. Use it, and you will not have unpleasurable surprises. Here are some examples of mistakes, that could easily happen:

# 1 One of my sites had a combo-box, that allowed user to choose a country. Country list has about 19 islands "* Island" or "* Islands". This way, my site's first priority keyword was "island", and it did not have any relation whatsever to islands.

# 2 One of my sites had a translator plug-in with several pictures of different country flags. If a user clicked that flag – he would get translation of a current page. The problem was, that every flag had an "alt" tag with values ​​like: "flag_en", "flag_de", "flag_it" and so on. This menu appeared in all of my pages, and had several languages ​​turned on – making the word "flag" second most important keyword on my site. Bad, is not it?

# 3 My friend had a site, with several flash gadgets embedded, each one checking whether Adobe Flash was installed. This way, his 3 most important keywords were "Adobe", "Flash", "Player", which is total nonsense.

Remember to plan your site carefully, think about what keywords you want to dominate, put them in titles, headers, do not forget the "alt" tag in images (as we see from my example # 2 – they are equally as important) , check the keywords density, to avoid stuffing (there are online tools, that are easy to find, for this purpose), and get yourself a Google Webmaster panel. It strongly helps keeping track of your site's SEO condition.

Source by John Stillavin