Web Content Writer Essential Skills

The manner in which a web content writer places keywords on a page can be just as important as the keywords themselves. Once you’ve got your stellar list of keywords, you don’t just toss keywords onto the page like sprinkles on an ice cream Sunday. Clumsily using the keywords can limit their effectiveness or even render them useless.

There are three important concepts that every content writer should know regarding keywords. How well the concepts are followed will go a long way in determining how a site ranks among search engines, like Google, Bing and Yahoo!.

Picking One or Two Phrases per Page
Content writers should optimize each page for one or two keyword phrases. It’s difficult to optimize a page for multiple keywords as the best positions for keywords on a page are limited. Position such as the beginning of a <TITLE> tag should be reserved for the main keyword. Secondary keywords—words that are less important than the primary keyword—should then be used to support the primary keyword. If you’re using a primary keyword about once every 100 words, the secondary keyword should be used half has much.

Watching Density
The number of times a content writer places a keyword onto a page compared to the number of other words on a page has a major effect on a site’s placement on search engine results. When a user searches for a keyword phrase, the search engine looks at a page and checks the density—the ratio of the search phrase to the total number of words in the page. If the density is too high—say 50 percent—a search engine may decide the page was created purely to grab the search engine’s attention. If the density is too low, the search engine may ignore the page altogether.

Spread Keywords throughout the Site
If a website content writer creates multiple pages using the keyword term or terms, that site is much more likely to place higher on a search engine than a site with only a single page containing the keyword. Some search engines, like Google, provide two results for a page—one indented underneath the other—and if your site only has a single page devoted to a keyword, this can’t happen.

A professional web content writer can help with keyword use and it may behoove you to reach out to one instead of handling the task on your own.

This article was written by Joseph Kausch, Content Strategist at Star Content, LLC. All rights reserved © Star Content 2010.