Do-It-Yourself SEO: Be Careful with Your Keywords

If you're trying to optimize your own website - and I strongly believe that all entrepreneurs and website owners should at least be familiar with optimization techniques - then there's a great possibility you've been researching and studying and reviewing all the information you can get.

But you need to make sure that you're studying current information. That's because the search engines change their algorithms on a regular basis and if you're using outdated information you might be doing more damage than good.

A few years ago, entrepreneurs wanting to optimize their own web pages were taught to fill their pages with their keywords. No matter what. Just throw the keywords in whilly-nilly, and as long as the words appeared a certain percentage of the time, it didn't really matter whether they made sense or not.

If your keyword appeared over and over again in your web page, the search engines awarded you a lot of points. The web page that had the highest frequency of a particular keyword was awarded the most points and would appear first in the search engines.

But this system left a lot of room for abuse. Spammers quickly learned that they could stuff a web page with highly sought-after keywords and easily benefit from all that free traffic. In no time at all, the search engines were returning irrelevant results. The programmers knew that something had to change, or web surfers would no longer use their search engine.

So they changed their algorithms. Several times. And then a few more times.

And it is now much more important to write your web page copy in a natural manner, so your human visitors will understand what you're talking about. After all, it's your human visitors who are reading your text. It's your human visitors who are buying your products. It's your human visitors who are becoming your clients.

But there is actually more to it than that. Writing naturally is more than just being altruistic and acknowledging that your website visitors are actually living, breathing, human beings. Writing for humans IS writing for the search engines.

That's because the search engines have gotten smarter. Really smart. (Almost scary smart.) They now actually have the ability to distinguish between natural, human language and keyword-stuffed or machine-generated language. They can utilize latent semantic indexing to determine whether the surrounding text is legitimately discussing the keywords in question.

So be careful with your keywords. Don't force them to appear a certain number of times, resulting in an unnatural flow of your web copy. Write your text naturally, so it reads just like you would talk.

And use complimentary keywords. If your web page is about German Shepherds, be sure to include the words "dog" and "puppy" and other equivalent words. Read your text out loud. If it doesn't sound like you would say it, rewrite it.

The good news is, this is a win-win-win situation. You will find it is actually easier to write your web copy when you write in a natural manner. The search engines will be able to return relevant results. And your web visitors will find the content and information they are actually looking for, rather than a spammy, keyword-stuffed web page.

Oh yeah, you'll probably make more sales too.