When making your site SEO-friendly, it’s important to understand the hierarchy of importance in terms of the steps you need to take. There are a multitude of granular tweaks that should be made, but best practices dictate that you should take care of the broader issues first before drilling down into the fine-tuning. In other words, you should always start at the top and work your way down; with site optimization, “the top” means “keywords.”

Along with one other step that we’ll discuss in a later blog, the most important factor that search engines such as Google and Yahoo! take into account when ranking your site is the site’s content – what does it say, how often does it say it, and is what it says relevant to the site’s purpose? The search engines answer these questions by scanning your site and “reading” every word on the site that can be read and instantly analyzing how often each word is used. As a very simple example, let’s assume that we have a single-page Web site about Golden Retrievers with only one paragraph of text. If that paragraph read:

The Golden Retriever is a medium-sized breed of dog. They were historically developed as gundogs to retrieve shot waterfowl such as ducks and upland game birds during hunting and shooting parties. As such, they were bred to have a soft mouth to retrieve game undamaged and have an instinctive love of water. The golden retriever has a dense inner coat that provides it with adequate warmth. The outer coat is sleek and water repellent, and lies flat against the body. The official colour of the breed is the varying shades of gold that are most often seen. These dogs are well suited to suburban or country environments. They need lots of outdoor exercise but should be kept fenced in because of their instincts as hunting dogs.**

…Google would then return the following TOP-TEN results (word, # of times used on page, percentage of usage):

DOGS – 2 – 2.2%
GAME – 2 – 2.2%
RETRIEVE – 2 – 2.2%
WATER – 2 – 2.2%
HUNTING – 2 – 2.2%
GOLDEN – 2 – 2.2%
COAT – 2 – 2.2%
RETRIEVER – 2 – 2.2%
BREED – 2 – 2.2%
AN – 2 – 2.2%

From these results, we can see that our page is going to be recognized for the words “dogs,” “game” and “retrieve” more than anything else. Not a bad start, but we want our page to show up on searches for “golden retrievers” specifically. Best practices tell us that the ideal percentage of use for a word is between 3 and 9%, so let’s adjust our paragraph a little bit:

Golden Retrievers are a medium-sized breed of dog. Golden Retrievers were historically developed as gundogs to retrieve shot waterfowl such as ducks and upland game birds during hunting and shooting parties. As such, Retrievers were bred to have a soft mouth to retrieve game undamaged and have an instinctive love of water. Golden Retrievers have dense inner coats that provides them with adequate warmth. The outer coat is sleek and water repellent, and lies flat against the body. The official colour of the Golden Retriever breed is the varying shades of gold that are most often seen. These dogs are well suited to suburban or country environments. Golden Retrievers need lots of outdoor exercise but should be kept fenced in because of their instincts as hunting dogs.

As you can see, we have altered the wording slightly to use the words “golden” and “retrievers” more frequently. If we re-analyze this paragraph, we now get the following results:

GOLDEN – 5 – 4.42%
RETRIEVERS – 5 – 4.42%
DOGS – 2 – 2.1%
GAME – 2 – 2.1%
RETRIEVE – 2 – 2.1%
WATER – 2 – 2.1%
HUNTING – 2 – 2.1%
BREED – 2 – 2.1%
AN – 1 – 1.32%
BRED – 1 – 1.32%

We have now moved the words “golden” and “retrievers” into first and second place, respectively – the ideal setup for optimizing a site about Golden Retrievers. This means that Google is now going to identify our page as a site that is 100% relevant to any searches for “golden retrievers.” Additionally, those words are followed closely by other relevant terms such as “dogs,” “retrieve,” “hunting” and “breed,” and we have removed some weight from the useless word “an.” Further tweaking of the text could improve these results even more, although you always want to be careful to ensure that your copy sounds natural and is not overly padded with keywords; search engines will penalize a site’s rankings for keyword “stuffing.”
Of course, we know that ours is certainly not the only Web site out there on the subject of Golden Retrievers so we’ll need to do a considerable amount of further optimization in other areas if we want to be top of the search engine rankings, but this first, fundamental step is the foundation upon which all of our other efforts will be built.

**”Golden Retrievers.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 20 Mar. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2012.