Keywords
A major role in search engine optimization is the use of keywords. Keywords are so important because the use of them will either rank or not rank your site on search engines. Abusing the use of keywords will only lead to bad consequences and a tarnished reputation on the web.
When optimizing a page with keywords or phrases you should a maximum of 3 per page. The percentage of keywords in your text should be between three and five percent of the total content on the site.
Ultimate SEO Tool is a free online tool that tells you the percentage of each word on your site.
Keywords should be simple and straight to the point. When adding keywords in the keyword tag use shoes,blue,red,brown not shoes, and blue shoes, and red shoes, and brown shoes. “And” is considered a stop word and a search engine will ignore these type of words. Another useful tip on keywords is use your top keywords in the title tag as well as in the description tag. Make sure you write a meaningful description of you site in your description tag. Why would you? Well, why would anyone want to visit a site where they do not understand what the site is or its purpose. What is the point of coming up in rank if no one can understand your site.
Keyword Effectiveness
How do you know that your keywords are effective? One way is to use the tool (seomoz.org) that generates a comprehensive report about how well a keyword achieves it’s goal. If you do not want to use this specific tool some more ways to measure keyword effectiveness is by analyzing the percentage of traffic from search engines over time. You can also measure a site’s stickiness and brand blurriness. Site stickiness measurements are taken from the first page of a website because the home page is almost always the most trafficked site on a website. The stickiness metric measures if people are able to find what they had been expecting to find as soon as they arrive on the site. Brand blurriness refers to visitors who have searched for a similar product but landed on your page. If this is the case then you may have a branding problem.
In order to measure site stickiness and brand blurriness you can use scorecarding. Scorecarding is a set of statistics and analytics on how a company is doing from week to week and month to month. These scorecards are are given to client. Scorecards charts all of the metrics you have gathered and presents the information to your client, marketing department, management, and whoever else if keeping track of your data.
Keywords and Information Architecture
Search Engine Watch: Keywords and Site Architecture
Keywords and Site Architecture
This article explains how to use keywords in your site’s architecture and how it can be helpful to users.
SEO Tools
Check Google PageRank
Description: Type any site you want into the input box and it returns the page ranks of the site on Alexa, PageRank, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, and from all over the web
Google Keyword Tool
Description: This tool helps you to brainstorm new keyword ideas for your site. You can also type in your website’s url and it can generate keywords for your site based off of your site’s content.
Google Search-based Keyword Tool
Description: Google has created a new keyword tool that generates keywords and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website
Mashable.com: SEO Toolbox
This article has a list of 30 SEO tools that will help improve your sites SEO
Seomoz.org
This tool analyzes the frequency and location of keywords throughout a page. The Term Targeting tool assigns a letter-grade to a page that represents how well certain keywords are targeted
Sources
Search Engine Guide: Measuring Website Effectiveness
SEONotes.com: Better Search Engine Placement Through A Combination of SEO Strategies