SEO Factors to Consider

Link Building is the start of a journey to higher natural rankings. But there are other factors that should also be considered.

Duplicate Content
Duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content from a different domain or is appreciably similar.

What does that mean? It’s confusing. Some professional SEO guys say that you can lose ranking if another site owner copies your content and places it on his site, or (ahem), you copied someone else’s content and pasted onto your site.

Personally, I think that’s a load of B.S. The evidence just doesn’t prove this too be true. Well on one side anyway. If you use an article for example from another web site, you won’t get as much “juice” for it since Google found it somewhere else first. But it’s not going to hurt your rankings (unless your entire site is copied content – also called scrapped content).

On the other hand it CAN NOT hurt you if someone scrapes your content – as long as google has indexed it on YOUR site first.

Metatags
Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements to provide structured metadata about a web page. What does that mean? Metatags provide information visible to the search engines that help the engines download, categorize, and index your site. You’ll have a hard time ranking if your tags are not structured correctly.

Of the 3 major meta tags – Title. Description, and Keywords, the TITLE tag is the single most important. That’s what the search engines are looking at when they index your site.

The Description tag: is for “click conversion” meaning that it should be used to “sell the click” when someone sees your site in the search engines.

The Keywords tag is pretty much worthless for SEO these days. However, including a FEW can’t hurt.

Keyword Density:
Keyword density is the percentage/number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on a page.

Most SEO professionals suggest a keyword density of 2-7% but that number differs depending on who you are listening too. What does that mean? It’s pretty straight forward. Its the number of times your keywords appear on a page in relation to the total number of other words on the page.

So if you are trying to rank for a specific key word, that word should be on the page you are trying to promote. But not too many times as this could cause a drop in the rankings. Lots of “experts” claim you should aim for 4%.

But that too is a shot gun approach, and could actually get you in trouble. My friend and the SEO expert TO the “SEO Experts” is Jerry West of WebMarketingNow.com and he tells a different story.

The percentage of Keyword Density you should use is dependent on WHAT YOUR COMPETITORS are using and for their top ranking pages that you are trying to beat them on.

So for example if you have a competitor who ranks #1 for a keyword you want to target, figure out what THEIR KWD is and start there. You might be able to rank with a KWD of 2%. Or it might need to be higer.

Now of course there are many other factors that come into play here but this should give you a beter understanding of how KWD is figured and how to use it on your pages.