‘Keyword stuffing’ is a general term for the unethical (or ‘Blackhat’) technique of repeating keywords and keyphrases within a webpage so that it ranks highly.

If you’ve read a little about on-site optimisation (see the basic SEO section of posts on this site) you might be tempted to try this, as at first glance it appears to be the answer to ranking highly.

However, search engines measure the keyword density of your pages (the number of times words appear on a page compared to the total number of words). If it is too high, they will consider the page spam and lower it’s ranking or remove it from the search engine results entirely.

Keyword stuffing can also make pages pretty horrible for user - remember, web pages are for people as well as search engines! You have to tread the line between making sure keywords are repeated in a page and keeping it readable.

Nothing to do with search engine optimisation, but essential to any internet user: AVG have released a new version of their free anti-virus software.

You can download it here.

This link was a little bit hidden in the reminder they sent, because the emphasis is on the full version which you have to pay for. But the free version is fine for me. I’ve had a couple of virus problems that it has dealt with very efficiently, so I’m sticking with it.

Just found this great free offer. You can get $200 worth of free advertising with Microsoft’s AdCentre programme if you sign up before 15th January 2007.

Thanks to SEOBook for the heads up.

This is a useful bookmarklet that I use when submitting to directories, looking for link exchanges and checking my own site. A Bookmarklet is a little snippet of javascript which you can add to your browser in the form of a bookmark (Firefox) or favourite (Explorer).

It requests the cached page in Google for the web page you are currently viewing. Useful to check if the web page has been crawled by Google and when it was last crawled.

Click and drag the following link to your toolbar or right click and add to your bookmarks or favourites: Google Cache

Once you have designed and optimised your site you need to check how it is ranking in the search engines and how much traffic you are getting to your site. Depending on how your site is doing, you may then need to change your pages slightly.

You can check your ranking manually by typing your keywords into the search engines and seeing where your site appears, or you can be more analytical and use SEO software to track your ranking over time. This software automates the process of checking your rankings and means you can check for many keywords on several different search engines at the same time.

There is also another Digital Point online tool you can use, their keyword tracker.

You should also be able to check the statistics for your website to see how many visitors it has and the search phrases they have used to find your site.

Monitoring and analysing your rankings, and the amount of traffic to your site, are very important aspects of SEO. You need to make sure what you are doing is working - but don’t expect overnight results. Over time, you should see a steady increase in your ranking for the keywords you are targeting and a resulting increase in traffic.

Also remember that your competitors are going to be working on their websites, trying to improve their search engine positions, so even if you achieve a high ranking, the SEO work doesn’t stop there. You need to continually monitor your site, build links and add content so you can maintain a top position.