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How To Count Keywords And Make Keywords Count
by Thomas Benton

The time to start thinking about keywords is before you start designing your web page. Choosing the correct keyword or keyword phrase is important. But that's another topic and another article. In this article we'll deal with keyword placement and density and introduce a free tool that you can use to analyze keyword density.

PLACES WHERE KEYWORDS COUNT

o Title
o Description (Meta Tag)
o Keywords (Meta Tag)
o Near the beginning of your page content
o Anywhere else on your page, including at the bottom

Place your main keyword(s) as near to the beginning of your title as possible. For instance, *Web Design, A Beginner's Guide* would rank better than *A Beginner's Guide to Web Design*. *Web Design, A Beginner's Guide to Designing Web Sites* could rank even higher. Assuming your keyword phrase is web design, of course.

The same rule applies to the meta tag description. Place your chosen keywords at or near the beginning of the description. Example: *Web design is fun and easy. A Beginner's Guide to Designing Web Sites makes it possible for anyone to quickly learn how to design and build a great website. Web design is one of today's fastest growing home based businesses.*

Here we've started with web design, repeated web and design in other forms and again near the end of the description. We've also added secondary keywords, web site, website, and home based businesses.

We would list our meta tag keywords in order: *web design build website design home based business* There's a lot of disagreement among the search engine placement gurus as to whether keywords should or shouldn't be separated by commas. Most do agree that it is better to use a few keywords rather than dozens though. Keyword density is, of course, increased with fewer meta keywords.

When you begin writing the content for your page be sure to repeat your keywords near the beginning of your page. Place them in header tags (H1, H2, etc.). Use them in headings and subheadings. Avoid keyword spamming. Work them into the natural flow of your page content. If your keyword sounds like it belongs in the sentence, put it there. Otherwise, leave it out.

Keywords can also be effective when included in closing copy near the bottom of the page. And, use them in navigation as text links. If you use buttons or other images for navigation, use keywords as ALT text for the image.

COUNT YOUR KEYWORDS

Notetab Light, a free text editor available for download at http://www.notetab.com, makes analyzing keyword density simple and easy.

First, copy and paste the page's HTML into Notetab Light. Then place your cursor at the beginning of your web page, click Search - Count Occurrences. Type your keyword or phrase in the popup window. Notetab will then tell you how many times your keyword or phrase appears on the page.

Notetab Light also gives a count of all the words on a page and the density percentage. If you use this feature you can skip the step above. Click Tools - Text Statistics. A popup window will give you the total number of characters and number of words. Click on the *>> More* button and the text statistics will be displayed in the window. In the list, scroll down until you find the keyword. You'll see the frequency (the count) and the percentage (density)in the
table. This is for individual words only. If you want to count a keyword phrase you'll have to use the Count Occurrences feature.

When you're satisfied, submit your page to the search engines. Then, after you find that your page is listed, compare it to the listings above yours. Did they do a better job with keywords? If not, it's possible that keyword density doesn't have much impact on ranking in that particular search engine.

If you find that pages ranked above yours did a better job, go back and adjust your keywords. Then resubmit. Don't freak out over search engine ranking though. If you can't get a better ranking after two or three tries, find another way to promote your site. Or, create a doorway page using different variations of the keywords.

Learn as you go. Apply what you learn. You'll soon be a keyword *master*!

The author, Thomas Benton, has been designing websites and marketing on the web since 1998. He helps beginning Internet Entrepreneurs *get it right the first time* at
http://www.webdesignwisdom.com. (Check out his unique web search site http://www.slingsearch.com.)