IHOW PROMINENT ARE YOUR KEYWORDS?

                                                                                                                                    By Bill Hunt

Search engines start with the basic assumption that all words do not have equal importance on a page. Words in a title or in a heading are more important than words in a body paragraph—these locations of keywords are their placement. Keywords also show their value by their position—how close to the beginning of a page element that they are. For example, words at the beginning of the body (or the start of the body) are usually more important than those that show up later in that same element. So, when we combine the concepts of placement and position, the most prominent keyword location is the first word of the page’s title. Search engines look for a keyword in prominent places (and in prominent positions within those places) because it’s one of the best clues to what the page is actually about. Pages with a keyword in prominent locations tend to be good matches. Search engine marketers referrer to this as "keyword prominence."

Many site owners believe they have mastered the elements of prominence, but a recent detailed page analysis of several travel sites revealed that this is not the case. We took special note of the absence of keyword prominence on a number of sites using more aggressive or spamming techniques.

In terms of keyword prominence, search engines focus on three primary locations to understand page content: the title tag, the heading tags, and of course the copy in the body. You can use the following guidelines to increase the prominence of your most important keywords, which should result in higher search engine rankings.

Title Tag

You know already how important the title tag is and that your primary keyword phrase must be in the title to even have a chance to rank for the most competitive terms. The title tag, like the title of book, gives the reader a quick and easy description of what the page is about, so the engines give this a significant number of points. However, it takes more than just being in the title to give you the edge. The primary keyword phrase should be the first words in the title to get maximum benefit.

A review of the results of a Google search for "Los Angeles hotels" reveals that only four of the top ten results contained the phrase in the first three positions of the title. Interestingly, three of the four were the top three positions, with the fourth sitting at number five. The rest of the results had some combination of the phrase in the title, but not with the exact phrase or in the same position of prominence.

Page Headings

These are typically the larger, bold headings on the page that most resemble the titles of an article in a newspaper or magazine. They break up the running text and indicate what the paragraphs below are about. Many websites use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in page layout, which makes it easier to code, but in some cases, search engines may not understand or interpret CSS.

The key is to use the "old school" HTML version of a heading tag such as <h1> or <h2>, which is the easiest for search engines to detect. If you use style sheet tags, try to use a "class ID" that can be interpreted as a heading, i.e. class="BodyHeader" or class="H1." Alternatively, to maintain the look of the site and the easy detection of traditional heading tags, you can use <h1> tags in conjunction with your style sheet tags, for instance <H1 class="Heading">Boston Hotels</H1>.

Body Text

The lack of keyword prominence is a common problem with travel sites, which tend to focus on the description of the destination and do not integrate keywords into the body other than in a heading. The easiest way you can improve your body text is to make sure that your primary keyword phrase appears closer to the top of the page and is highlighted with a form of emphasis such as bold or italics. If you are pulling in third-party destination descriptions, you can write your own unique introduction paragraph that is used on all pages and contains the destination keyword phrase. This will allow you to position the text where you want it while keeping the integrity of third party content.

There are a number of optimization tools that can help you with your keyword prominence analysis, but an excellent free tool can be found at http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html. With this tool, you can enter your URL and keyword phrase and it will score your page. You can compare this with the pages of your competition to see where they have put the emphasis and replicate a similar or higher placement.

As travel marketers promoting hundreds or thousands of individual destinations, you typically do not have the time to manually edit those thousands of pages. The easiest thing to do is to build it into your templates. Since many of you are using dynamically created pages, you can build the elements described above into the templates allowing them to do the heavy lifting of making sure our phrases are displayed prominently.

The key takeaway is that search engines are nothing more than applications using pattern matching tied to a set of rules to interpret what a page is about. The easier you can make their interpretation of your page by making key elements more prominent, the more effectively they can "understand" your page and give it that high ranking it rightfully deserves.
 

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