How much text should you have on a web page?

The answer is - as much as you need to get a good spread of keywords and phrases. It is unlikely you will get good coverage of alternatives in 2 or 300 words. Since there is no penalty for having more text on a page - unless the page gets to be 45Kb in size or more - take the opportunity to write more text and include so-called long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are less competitive since they are searched for less but if you have 2 competitive keywords compared to 10 long-tails, you might end up getting just as many long-tails hits in searches. You certainly won't lose anything.

One way to start working out a good set of keywords is to look at sites in a similar market. A good set of keyword analysis tools can be found on www.googlerankings.com. The tools on this site can be used to see what 1, 2 and 3 word phrases appear on a web page. Try to make sure the text on your site includes the same phrases where appropriate.

Tips for thinking up new keywords are:

1. Always include alternative ways of saying the same thing, e.g. an animal mask/ face mask and kids/ children.

2. Try to include the words in different orders, e.g. a man's hat/ a hat for a man, Kids arts & crafts software/ Arts and crafts software for children.

3. Another way of packing in possible keywords is to include a column on left or right with a list, e.g. dog mask, cat mask, horse mask, party mask, make your own mask ...

Never lose an opportunity to include an alternative way of saying something. Two ideal places to do this are:

1. alt text on images

2. title text on a hyperlink.

HTML tags are also an important way of highlighting keywords to Googlebot. The top tags are <title>, <h1> and <h2>.

The page title <title> is an excellent place to include up to 3 keyword/ phrases. Separate the keywords by - or |. The page title is often considered the most important SEO element. Make sure your most important keywords are at the start of the title.

The <h1> tag is the most important header tag (and should be near the top of the page) but <h2> is important too. Structure the page so that you can use a h2 title. If you can't restructure a page in order to place a h2 tag, make a paragraph of your most important text into a h2 tag and use CSS to style it like a <p> tag.

Make some of your keywords bold or strong to emphasise them - Googlebot picks up this as well as a human reader.

Also, always make sure your important keywords are near the top of the page. Ideally, your first paragraph of text after your h1 tag should be nicely worded with your main keywords.

I'll include more tips on keywords and linking strategies in a later post.

by ML