Let's talk about one of the many elements that search engines use to rank pages, often referred to as Keyword Ratio. This is the number of times a keyword appears on a web page relative to the other words on the page. It is a primary element that search engines consider when determining how relevant a page is prior to rendering search results.

For example, say you offer a variety of men's and women's cologne and perfume on your web site, and you wanted to rank well under the keyword/phrase "women's perfume." First, what you don' t want to do is repeat "women's perfume" over and over indiscriminately throughout the page. This is the oldest trick in the book, and most search engine caught on to this a long time ago. Instead of helping you rank higher, this will do one of two things:

1. Get you page penalized for spamming, causing it to be buried so deep no one will ever find it.
    
2. Possibly prompt an inspection by a human and the search engine may ban your domain from the index permanently.

Instead of trying to subvert the index with this age-old technique, experiment with different keyword ratios. If your keyword/phrase "women's perfume" appears along with nine other words, your keyword density would be 10%. If it appears with 99 other words, it would be considered 1%. If it appears on the page all by itself it would be considered 100%. Test different ratios. Our extensive testing indicates that if keyword density is kept somewhere below 12%, that element of your web pages should generate decent results. It all depends on the search engine.

Tip: Determining Your Ratio
Here is how you can help determine keyword/phrase ratio on longer documents. If you have Microsoft Word, it has a feature where it will give you the total "word count" for a page with just a few clicks (pulldown menu: tools, word count). After you have your total count, you can then ask it to find (edit, find, replace, replace all) a specific word or phrase. Use the replace function to replace your keyword/phrase with itself.

In other words, if you want a count on the keyword/phrase "women's perfume", then type "women's perfume" in the "find what" box and the same "replace with" box. It will replace "women's perfume" with "women's perfume". There is no change to the document, but it tells you how may "replacements" there were. Then just simply divide to get your ratio. Once you try it, it will make more sense.

Generally speaking, "natural English" sentences using your keyword/phrase with minor modifications will get the job done. Doing it this way, you are also more likely to have presentable content that a visitor to your site would find captivating.

Bear in mind that there are numerous other variables, including the overall amount of content on the page, keyword positioning and more. Also, remember each search engine has separate criteria. What works on one, may not work on another. Test, test, test and keep track of your results

Christina Daly is director of 0101 Web Marketing a leading web promotion company and author of "The Search Engine Intelligence Report."
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