Truth in Advertising. Most of us are familiar with the phrase, an axiom that serves as the holy grail of search engine algorithms. As discussed in our Keyword Harmony article, search engines crawl websites to discover and categorize the content that they contain, hopeful that this content will satisfy the interest of an Internet search. The algorithms used to grade the relevance of websites contain complex, weighted formulas that juggle hundreds of factors to determine when and where a website should appear for a search query.

Play On Words

While keyword density, or the percentage of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears in a document is an important factor in determining a website's content, other factors such as surrounding text and anchor text are also considered as part of content ranking equation.

With what is known as semantic technology, search engines evaluate the relationship between the words in a document. For example, a search for "Java" could refer to an island, coffee, or a programming language. Since a website may have a strong keyword density for "Java", it is the surrounding copy, and how it's used, that helps the web crawler determine the meaning of the website.

Anchors Away

Anchor text is text contained on a website that links to other parts of the page or the website. If you have been exploring the Search Marketing Corporation website, you will notice words in orange that if clicked upon, will bring you to a web page which has information related to that keyword. By using anchor text whenever possible on your website, it indicates to the web crawlers that your website has depth, or offers more than one page related to a given keyword or keyword phrase. In most cases, depth means more relevance, which equates to a better user experience.

Keeping It Real

The goal is to try to get your website to rank well for a given keyword or keyword phrase, so that searchers find your website. But intentionally littering or 'spamming' your website with keywords to try to achieve top ranking is not worth the short term gains, if it works at all. If you write honest copy about the topic or product you are trying to promote, the subject of the copy should appear enough times in the document to help the search engines determine intent. Furthermore, the words and terms related to the subject will help satisfy the semantics part of the search algorithm, further authenticating the relevancy of the website. Lastly, honest copy provides a good user experience. People who visit your website and feel that it has value, will bookmark the website, revisit it, and tell other about it, building a strong user base.