The Keyword Mess	1.0/5.0 (1 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Brian Queenan December 22, 2006

While optimizing your website with good keywords is an important part of your search engine strategy, I do think that too many webmasters spend way too much time tweaking it to death. I don’t think that this is a good idea nor do I think that it is beneficial to their website. All that time spent on one thing while neglecting the rest of their marketing strategies in the long run is hurting their online business. So much time is wasted getting those keywords just right actually hurts the quality of the content on their web pages.

I know that most of us are taught to find a main keyword and build your website around that keyword. I know that’s what I did in the beginning. I think that’s a big mistake because it takes away from the quality of the content on the website because too much focus is put on the keyword trying to fit it in to get that web page optimized for the search engines. I’ve seen so many websites where you can tell that the website was built around specific keywords because so much of the content is really hard too understand and that it doesn’t make much sense at all. You can actually pick out the keywords because they are used so many times. While you need to use your keywords throughout your content, you don’t need to overkill them. Using your keywords too often will actually hurt you with the search engines more than it will help you.

There’s a better way to optimize your website without hurting your content. I have found that the best way to optimize a web page is to use just one keyword that is super targeted to the content on that web page. Use the best keyword that you can possibly find and put it aside for the moment. Using a good word processor go and write the content for your web pages. Forget about using your keyword or writing any html tags altogether until you have finished writing the content. When you have finished writing your content, read through it to make sure that it makes sense. Also check to see if your content doesn’t already have a keyword that you may have already written unintentionally that may be better than the one that you have already chosen. I have found many great keywords by going through this process. It is advantageous to check to see if there are any hidden gems sitting there in the already written content.

If there is not a better keyword within your content, you can now go back and start inserting your keyword in the body your web page. The main objective when doing this is that your keyword blends in with the content in a way that it makes sense. You will probably have to make some changes so that it does blend in, and that it does makes sense. Of course you will need to put your keyword in the normal places. It should appear in the title, description Meta tag, keyword Meta tag, heading, and the body. The body is where the keyword is most abused by webmasters. While the keyword needs to appear throughout the body, it doesn’t need to be there hundreds of times. Using your keyword two to three percent of the time within the body is more than sufficient.

Repeat the above process for all of your web pages. You will find that you will have a well optimized website that makes perfect sense.

The last and probably the most important thing that you need to do when you are finished is to forget about doing any more optimizing. It takes time to see if your chosen keyword will be of benefit or not. If you use a super targeted keyword it will be. Forget about it and go focus on the things that you need to get done with your online business that you may have been neglecting.