Writing good keyword rich web pages is about treading the line between readability for users and providing keywords and phrases for the search engines to gobble up.

Those key phrases need to be in your web pages for the search engines but without making your copy completely unreadable for human beings.

Here are a few basic tips for achieving this:

Limit use of words like ‘We’ and ‘it’

Instead, repeat the name of the company/ site or what the company/ site does. For example, instead of “We provide plumbers in the….” use “Gifford Plumbing Services provide plumbers in the…”

Search engines ignore punctuation

This means, for example, that the words at the end of a sentence are combined with those at the start of the next sentence to form phrases – “We provide all kinds of plumbing. In Kent, the areas we are able to cover include….” yields the phrase plumbing in Kent.

Use Title and Alt attributes

You can be a bit more liberal with keywords and phrases in the unseen parts of your code, such as Title and Alt attributes, but don’t stuff them and remember they are important for accessibility. The Title text for a button should be “Button: Homepage for Gifford Plumbing Services” not just “Button: Homepage”

The Title and Alt attributes can also be used to include phrases and keyword variations that are difficult to include in the normal content. Don’t just repeat keywords and phrases that are in the anchor tags.

Use named anchors

You can also add named anchors to your page, whether you use them or not. These are another opportunity to add keyphrases without making your on-screen copy unreadable. (Using them in internal links also means you can include keyphrases in the URLs).

Use keyphrases in filenames

Make sure the files in your site have keyphrases in the filenames. This is another good way to include keywords which may be difficult to include in normal text.

Break up copy with headings and bulleted lists

This is good practice for writing on the web anyway as it makes a web page more readable. It also means you can repeat and emphasise important information, which naturally contains keyphrases.

‘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.