How to.... check your your site for relevancy.

There are three main areas that constitute rankings in search engines. Spider accessibility, keyphrase relevancy and authority. Last month we discussed how to... check if your site is built for search engines basic spider accessibility. One of the biggest problems faced with webmasters and site owners alike is how to identify what phrases to optimise for.

One of the better tools for this is from Yahoo!. Yahoo! publishes data on searches every month for the previous month.

Once you have researched the keyphrases you need to target, the next stage is it ensure you have copy in the site that is matched to that keyphrase. It might appear a little obvious but there is no point targeting for "car insurance" in your copy when the phrase you are after is "motor insurance". You must also remember that whilst a picture speaks a thousand words - when it comes to seach engines the thousand words speak louder that pictures.

At this point the mistake is often made to write the copy, filling it with keyword repeats and distroying the flow. There is no need to to this, most of the search engines have been working on over optimisation filters for years. As such over use of "keyword stuffing" techniques is not desirable, it doesn't help with your message, it doesn't help with your professionalism and can have a detrimental effect in search engines.

You might also consider hiding text on the pages, trust me what ever you are thinking it has been done before and whilst you may get away with it for a while, as soon as the site starts to improve in its rakings, if there is something hidden away your competitors will take great pride in reporting your antics to the search engines as "spamming" techniques.

You should also optimise each page to no more than 2 or 3 search terms, and ensure you have unique meta copy, relevant to the content on the page for each page.

More information is available for free on our SEO Tutorials page.

M.P

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