Right words in the right places

A big part of search engine optimisation (SEO) is making sure you use words people are likely to search for:

• Obvious and in plain language (dog rather than canine)
• Short (TV rather then television)
• Come up in natural conversation
• Don't jar if you use them repeatedly when talking about the subject
• Broad, all-encompassing terms
• Narrow, specific terms
• I realise the last two seem contradictory, but actually people search on both so you need to consider both
• Generic and product specific

The place where these words appear within your site determines their significance to a search engine. In order of importance:

1. URL (www.searchterm.com does better than www.somethingelse.com/searchterm)
2. Title bar (no-one searches on welcome or homepage)
3. Heads (particularly those coded with the h1 tag
4. Navigation (search engines use this to work out the context of your site)
5. The tops and lefts (of the whole page, each paragraph, even the URL)
6. Words associated with pictures (alt tags and words near picture such as captions)

Keyword stuffing is a technique where you work out what search terms you want your site to get a good ranking for and then making sure they appear in those important positions.

I think it is better to do it the other way around. Work out the best language to talk to your audience and that should produce a more natural site which also gets a high ranking. But you may also want to look at the key positions and check you are making the most of your site.