Keyword density is basically the number of times your selected keyword, or keyword phrase, appears in a web page. Keyword density is calculated by taking the total number of keywords on a page and dividing that by the total number of all words on the page.

For example, if you have 100 words on your web page, not including HTML code or any other code, and you use your keyword five times throughout the page, your keyword density is 5%.

Here’s what the numbers look like:

5 (keyword usage) divided by 100 (total words) = .05

0.05 x 100 = 5%

The key here is to not overuse a keyword or keyword phrase. You want to strive for a percentage between 3% and 5%. You should never exceed this as it might be seen as keyword stuffing, or spamming, by search engines.

You want your keywords to appear in important places on your page. This includes the first paragraph, ending paragraph, and a few times in between. Remember to check that you don’t exceed the 5% limit; otherwise your page could be rejected by search engines and not be ranked in search results.

Keep this in mind when creating web pages. This rule applies to every single page of your web site. The most important page is your index or home page. You certainly want to use the optimal keyword density when optimizing your home page for the search engines.

Less than 5% density is best and it should sound natural to your visitors. You don’t want it to look obvious that you’re just throwing keywords in. You want the sentences to flow and sound natural to your visitors. Trust us, if your visitors notice you spamming your keywords, the search engines will too!

To build link popularity, you need incoming links to your website. These are called backward links, or backlinks for short. The more backlinks you have, the better. This is one of the main factors in search engine optimization.

When it comes to backlinks and building an authority, your backlinks need to be relevant to your website. For the most part you can control this. Backlink building methods such as article marketing, blog commenting, forum posting, etc. are all ways to build relevant backlinks.

When doing this, you want to make sure you use the keywords in the backlinks that you’re targeting your website for. This is important because it makes those links more relevant to your website, which will increase its authority.

If you provide quality content on your website, then more than likely other related websites will automatically link to you, aiding your backlink building process. What’s better is if these websites are popular themselves. This will greatly benefit your website.

Another way to build up your link popularity is to get other popular (authoritative) websites to link to you using link exchanges. The same principle applies here and will help your website gain in popularity.

Overall, as you steadily grow your link popularity, your website will continue to increase in search engine rankings, bringing in more targeted traffic. Remember to consistently be building backlinks to your site.

Of course, there are other factors at play here. On-page objects such as title tags, meta tags, content, etc. are all important for a website to rank well in search engines for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. For example, if we are trying to rank our website better for a certain keyword, we would include that keyword in the title tags, meta tags and body content.

Page reputation is a very powerful thing. However, on-page optimization of keywords for a web page or home page of your website has very little to do with the above example. It’s still important, but there are other factors at work here when it comes to a page’s reputation. The value being passed from the anchor text of a backlink has a lot to do with it.

All web pages have a reputation, from a little all the way up to having a very high authority. Getting your page reputation up is dependent on getting other pages with high reputation to link to you. This idea goes back to the link popularity idea where you build backlinks to your site.

Getting inbound links from other high reputation sites will increase your own page’s reputation. So the goal to increase your page reputation is to optimize your page for keywords, and then build relevant backlinks on other high authority pages using those keywords in the anchor text.

The keywords meta-tag contains the main keywords that describe the document’s content. They have to precisely reflect the page content and not mislead the search engines. As webmasters, it’s a futile attempt to manipulate the search engines with the use of meta-tags. And, with the search engines constantly evolving, it’s not known for sure whether this tag has any impact at all anymore. We recommend not to refuse the usage of the Keywords meta-tag, though, as long as you use it reasonably. Use only those keywords that are really relevant to the page.
Example of keywords tag use:

Description meta-tag is a brief content (summary) of the document. Some search engines use text included into description in snippets on search engine results page.
Use example:

Webmasters can also use robots meta-tags that may forbid search engines to index the page (noindex meaning) or count the links (nofollow).

• HTML-validator from W3C
• CSS-validator (checks CSS-code for correspondence to W3C requirements)
• Feed-validator (checks RSS, Atom and KML feeds)

We also recommend the document’s availability for correspondence to Section 508 requirements. You can do this at
http://www.contentquality.com/

Keywords

Make sure that keywords are included in the link, Title tag, Description tag and Keywords meta-tags. The presence of keywords in H1, H2 and H3 Heading tags can positively influence your site’s ranking as well. Finally, the presence of keywords in picture’s alt tag descriptions and title can also improve the site’s location in search engine results pages (SERPs).

But, as in any important matter, the main thing is not to overdo it. It’s critical to keep the density of keywords on the page within the rate of 5%-7%. For different niches, this rate can vary. The most reliable method of optimal keyword rate check is analysis of TOP10 sites.

Internal links

All pages you’re linking to have to be available. Make sure that all links are working correctly (meaning they are not broken).

Try to make the site user-friendly. Pages located five clicks from the main page do not have a very good chance of getting into the TOP 10 position in search engines for competitive phrases. Good practice is any page’s availability within three clicks of the main page.

Make sure that inner links lead to useful sites. Search engines can reduce the ranking of the sites that link to link farms, spam blogs and sites with malicious content. Don’t forget about the nofollow HTML-attribute.

Technologies

Many search systems still can’t index sites that are built using Flash technologies. Surplus usage of javascripts, incorrect tags’ usage (for example, no index) can impede the document’s indexing.
Dynamically created documents can have problems with the document’s indexation on conditions that addresses use large amounts of variables and sessions are lost.

Also, always remember that search engines analyze the document’s content, not visually, but by “reading” the document’s source code. Open your source code and mentally imagine that you are a search engine. Did you really allow the robot to understand what your site is about?

Content

Search engines give preference to those sites that offer their visitors fresh and unique content. Sites with duplicate content are reduced in SERPs. Arguments about the effects of duplicate content on a site could last for days. That’s why our advice is simple – write unique content all your own.

Reliability of a hosting provider

Technical troubles, (i.e. unreliability of a hosting provider) can often result in the site being unavailable for visitors. In this case search engines may lower the ranking.

Web masters have to control the presence of duplicate content on their site. It is recommended to carefully syndicate the content to other sites, use 301-redirect where needed and ban such article’s indexation in the robots.txt file.

If the amount of indexed web-pages is smaller than the actual one, the site receives fewer visits by low-frequency and mid-frequency inquiries. External links to the pages that are absent in a search engine’s index, as well as the creation of sitemaps, will help in this case.

Search engines count not only general link amounts but their quality too. Links received from authoritative sites (for example, The New York Times) have greater weight. Links received from public institutions, non-commercial organizations and university sites are able to positively influence the site’s location in the SERPs.

There are many parameters when evaluating the links search engines count: what keywords and phrases they include, whether they are similar to the subject of a page they are placed on and a page they point to. Other links placed around your links are also counted. If the link is located in one block with other links, search engines can consider them as paid ones. That’s why it’s better to place the links in offers. Offers??? I don’t know what you mean here, others might not as well.

The links also have to be natural. Participation in link exchanges, link spam and other means of promotion can lead to punishment or penalty.

When optimizing new sites, don’t forget about the sandbox effect.

Link growth has to be gradual: sharp surges of links growth can negatively influence the site’s ranking.

The Sandbox effect can last from one to several months, sometimes up to six months. Links from authoritative sites possessing high trust ranks will help to faster escape from the sandbox (one can write an entire article about trust ranks).

It’s necessary to remember that quick growth of link mass can be considered an attempt to cheat the search engines. In this case, a penalty will be unavoidable.

So here is our advice: As a sandbox practically can’t be avoided, use time to your benefit – continue improving the site and fill it with useful content.