Effective use of Keywords

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What is it that makes one iStadia profile more prominent on search enginges than another?

One thing that counts is the number of links to it. That's why we allow our member directory to be open. As well as allowing real people to browse your profile it tells search engines that you are there.

How can you increase the number of links to your profile?

Well, every time you post something on iStadia, whether that is a blog, an article, news or a forum post, a link is automatically created.

Alternatively, you can put a link to your iStadia profile on signatures (if you use other community sites), or your own website.

But, it isn't just the link that counts. If you really want to boost your profile's ranking on Google, then keywords count.

What does this mean?

Well, let's pick on someone. Rhona Shepherd works in sports management with her brother, Rowan. You'll see that I've added a link to her profile. I haven't said "click here to see Rhona's profile" or "visit Rhona's profile at http://www.istadia.com/go/rhonashepherd". I've associated the link with the keywords "sports management". Rhona has those keywords prominently in her profile too, which also matters.

Optimising your posts - put keywords in the title, text and tags.

In addition, if you want to increase the power of your posts further, as well as having keywords in the text that link to your profile (or your website), put them in the title. So, Rhona might create a blog called "What's new in Sports Management".

So, to recap. Links are good. Links with keywords in them are better. For posts, it is better still if you repeat the keywords in the title.

Finally don't foget the tags!

Tags: backlinks, google, istadia, keywords, optimisation, ranking, search engines, seo, tags

Posted Thu Sep 6 2007 1:09 AM by robrobson | Permalink | Comments(2) Share this article:

Comments

Another thing to think of that builds on what Rob says is this. The googlebot reads your webpages in a similar way a blind person's webpage 'reader' understands the page it is reading aloud. It only reads text and the only way it can tell what text is more important that another bit of text is by seeing if the author noted that, for instance, a particular set or words is a main title or a heading etc. Think about marking up the text in the same way you would format a word document. eg. You make each title an H1 title so that later when Word formats the contents page it knows what order the contents are in and what is important. Same idea applies. Tell the googlebot what the page is about and sure then repeat the keywords again a bit in the text, but don't over do it or google will work out that your over optimised and start ignoring the pages. The other classic thing people forget to do is forget to create and submit a XML sitemap to google - this somewhat tells the googlebot what pages to read on your site and will speed up the time between going live with your site and how long it takes for google to notice it. This is all SEO 101 and there are countless websites out there that can give you many many more tips.

Posted by Djpkerr | September 6, 2007 at 6:31 AM

Good point. Just to let members know that the sitemap is updated automatically, so you don't have to do anything...

Posted by robrobson | September 6, 2007 at 10:42 AM