Keyword use in body text
Overview
Google, also know originally as an information engine was set up to locate the information people wanted to find.
A HTML webpage has several parts to it, of which the <body> tag contains most of it.
It’s in the Body tag section which the web browser shows what is considered as the webpage.
It is therefore no surprise that Google looks as this aspect when deciding on how to rank a webpage.
History of the <body> tag
The <body> tag is one of the core HTML tags which have been within HTML pages since day one.
Most of code used to display a page is contained within this section.
It is for this reason Google places great weight on the content within this section.
To some degree Google has now gone full circle with its approach.
In the beginning pretty much only the on page copy was considered for ranking. When spammers used this to artificially inflate the position of the web page in the Google index, Google then looked at other ‘signals’ to make an informed judgement about what terms a page was important for.
These other signals include such things as inbound links. More recently Google has looked to reduce the impact of these other signals as they are just as easy to manipulate as the on page copy.
The upshot is that Google is now placing more weight again on the on page copy as one of a number of more balanced factors.
It is for this reason unique, well written copy has become just as important as the websites which link to it.
Google proof your search engine optimisation for the <title> tag
While it is true that no one outside of Google knows the mechanism for determining rank in its search engine listing, we do know Google likes the top ten pages for a given phrase for a reason, and it is this fact we can use to formulate our strategy.
The reason for looking at the top ten as a whole is that it allows us to remove the ‘freak’ results of any one website.
Optimising the body text for the phrase xbox 360 games on 6th December 2012 on Google UK
We could look at any phrase but it makes sense to look at a popular term. It’s also important to note that the internet is a fluid place and analysis on one day and with one search engine can be different on another day on another engine.
Looking at the top ten results the following can be seen
Search term: “xbox 360 games”
Competitors Your Site Advice
Number of keywords: 0 to 11
Keyword density: 0% to 5%
Number of words: 455 to 4,920
Search term: “xbox”
Number of keywords: 6 to 66
Keyword density: 1% to 3%
Search term: “360”
of keywords: 5 to 69
Keyword density: 0% to 3%
Search term: “games”
Number of keywords: 6 to 214
Keyword density: 1% to 8%
Keywords “xbox”, “360” or “games”
Number of keywords: 17 to 336.
Keyword density: 0% to 4%
Generally you would look to get as high in the above range as possible without going over the largest figure. If you were to work though the above you would quickly discover if you tried to hit the top of the range for ‘xbox 360 games’ you may not be able to hit the individual elements within the long tail search term.
In this instance the best way forward would be work out ‘your best fit’, wait for Google to index again and re evaluate that that point.