This is perhaps single most important aspect of ranking your website highly on search engines. While all of factors covered in this series will help get your website into top positions, it is your content that will sell your product or service and it is your content that search engines will be reading when they take their "snapshot" of your site and determine where it should be placed in relation to other billions of pages on Internet.

Over this series we will cover ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

1. Keyword Selection
2. Content Creation
3. Site Structure
4. Optimization
5. Internal Linking
6. Human Testing
7. Submissions
8. Link Building
9. Monitoring
10. The Extras

Step Four – Content Optimization

There are aspects of optimization process that gain and lose importance. Content optimization is no exception to this. Through many algorithm changes that take place each year, weight given to content on your pages rises and falls. Currently incoming links appear to supply greater advantage than well-written and optimized content. So why are we taking an entire article in this series to focus on content optimization?

The goal for anyone following this series is to build and optimize a website that will rank well on major search engines and, more difficult and far more important, hold those rankings through changes in search engine algorithms. While currently having a bunch of incoming links from high PageRank sites will do well for you on Google you must consider what will happen to your rankings when weight given to incoming links drops, or how your website fares on search engines other than Google that don't place same emphasis on incoming links.

While there are many characteristics of your content that are in algorithmic calculations, there are a few that consistently hold relatively high priority and thus will be focus of this article. These are:

1. Heading Tags
2. Special Text (bold, colored, etc.)
3. Inline Text Links
4. Keyword Density

Heading Tags

The heading tag (for those who don't already know) is code used to specify to visitor and to search engines what topic is of your page and/or subsections of it. You have 6 predefined heading tags to work with ranging from

to

Choosing keywords that will bring extra traffic to your website is something that SEO experts are trained to do. There is a popular method of choosing keywords that invloves calculation of something called KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index). KEI was devised by Sumantra Roy, a Search Engine Positioning specialist from http://www.1stSearchRanking.net. KEI is a very helpful indicator, but in my opinion, it is slightly flawed.

The KEI is basically a comparison of number of times a search term is searched versus number of search engine result pages that come up for that keyword phrase.

For example, let's say that you are developing a widget website. You want to sell lots of widgets. You do some research using *Overture's search term suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). You find out that following terms are searched a lot:

widget, red widget, blue widget, green widget, yellow widget.

You then go to *Yahoo and type in search terms to see how many websites show up for each term and you come up with following table: keyword phrase = widget # times searched = 10,000 # resulting pages = 1,000,000 KEI = 100

keyword phrase = red widget # times searched = 9,000 # resulting pages = 950,000 KEI = 85.26

keyword phrase = blue widget # times searched = 8,000 # resulting pages = 120,000 KEI = 533.33

keyword phrase = green widget # times searched = 7,900 # resulting pages = 900,000 KEI = 69.34

keyword phrase = yellow widget # times searched = 6,300 # resulting pages = 994,000 KEI = 39.93

According to KEI ratio, best keywords to choose are those with a high KEI (ie. most popular keywords, with lowest competition). This is a basic law of supply and demand. Based on chart above you might think,

"Ah ha! I should target blue widgets because it has a high KEI ratio."

The problem with this is that you are making assumption that a low quanity of competition is more important than quality of competition. This is a major FLAW. KEI does not factor in QUALITY of competion only quantity. I have come up with a simple method for determining quality of competition using *Google *Page Rank (although a better solution could be created based on backlinks of relevant sites).

This simple method is done by calculating average Page Rank for first n resulting pages for a given keyword search (where n is number of pages you want to be ranked in). So turning back to example above, let's say you want to be in top 10 (n=10) search engine ranking for blue widgets. Go to your search engine of choice or use your tool of choice and type in blue widgets as your keyword. Then check each page's PageRank in top ten results. Divide that number by 10. This calculates what I call KPI (Keyword Page Rank Index). The formula looks like this:

(P1+P2+..+PN)/N (where n is number of pages you are adding)

In my example above, let's look at new results: