Keywording

Keyword density

This is the percentage of words on your web page that match your desired keywords.
Search Engines use it to determine whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

However keyword density is a fragile element - too high, and you risk getting penalized. Too low, and your site isn’t ‘relevant’ enough.

Around 5%-7% key word density should be enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_density

Competition

It gets tricky when you get into competitors that are all using the same keywords, eg Company Formation.
The bottom line for this is that in the text in the main content of your site needs to include the keywords Company and Formation.
So why not just fill the homepage with those words over and over again?

Check out the number one result for ‘company formation’ in Google: http://www.ukcorporator.co.uk
How many times does it use the word ‘company’? (we counted 37 before we got bored!)

However you need keywords in all the right places – they need to be distributed through the page, and perhaps concentrated in the H tags (see section on good code).

Also consider: would you search for Company Formation, Form a company, Register a company?

Relevant Keyword phrases in domain names

It’s also widely believed that there are advantages to having the keyword as part of the domain name so http://websites.uk-plc.net/UK_PLC/epage12868.htm is probably not going to score as highly as http://www.companyformation.com
This may seem like nit-picking, but Google will use every technique it can when it comes down to choosing which order to display companies with identical rankings.

There are also some advantages to having the keyword as part of the subdomain, such as companyformation.uk-plc.net which is more relevant to large sites.

Keyword phrases in page filenames

Ideally your page file name should match your page META title, and both should include your #1 top-line keyword phrase being targeted for that specific page, unless, that #1 keyword phrase is too long. Page names should keep the phrases in the title separated with a – (hyphen or _ underscore).

E.g. linking to ‘company-formation-uk.htm’ is good, as it means that again the link to that page will include the keywords. ‘Compform0123.htm’ is not as effective.

Keyword phrases in linked text

Because hypertext links and keywords are used by search engines to index pages, it is logical that placing relevant keywords into linking text gives search engines a clue as to what each linked page is about, and this should help with ranking.

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/search-engine-optimisation/link-text.shtml

Content

The more content on your site, the better. The more frequently it is improved and expanded the better.

Rich content increases your chances of hitting on keywords that your customers might use. Plus it increases chances of people adding links to your site.

Google rewards ‘active’ sites, i.e. sites that continue to add new content on a regular basis. (Creating 100 nearly identical pages and adding them to your site in one go isn’t enough).