Word count
Search
engines now count every word on your web page. the search engines notice if you
have certain words or phrases repeated and will consider those repeated words or
phrases to be the main topic of your web page.
Words
near the beginning of a web page generally get more credit than words near the
end of the page.
Search
engines have gotten fairly good at spotting keyword pollution. This is a
technique where someone drops a whole lot of words into their web page just to
trick search engines. You want to avoid doing anything close to this because
even if your web page is honest, if the machine thinks you are using keyword
pollution, then they will lower your ranking or even ban you from their search
engines.
Headers
HTML
includes six levels of headers. These were originally intended for use as
outline subject titles. In practice, only the first three header levels (H1,
H2, and H3) are worth using because of rendering issues.
If
you use the well established non-fiction writing approach of creating an
outline first, then you will want to translate your outline into HTML headers
and preserve them in your final web page.
If
the search engine recognizes that you have done real outlining (which is done
by comoaring your headers to the text between the headers), then the search
engine will give extra positive credit to the words in your headers, increasing
your placement on keywords related to your web page.
Of
course, if you just create a bunch of misleading headers, the search engines
will spot that and assume that you are engaging in header pollution and
downgrade or ban your web site.
Note
that even if you don’t use an outline, you can still make use of headers by
using them as headlines and subheads. Go through your web page and every three
to five paragraphs create a high quality header that summarizes the topic of
those paragraphs.