Search Engine Optimization All-In-One For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Assigning Keywords to Pages

In This Chapter

• Knowing what search engines see as keywords

• Planning your site's themes

• Creating landing pages that attract and hold visitors

• Organizing your site into subject categories

• Consolidating themes for maximum ranking value

If you've read Chapters 1 through 3 of this minibook, you've already done a lot of the prep work for assigning keywords to pages. In this chapter, you use all of that research and prep work as we explain how you can assign keywords in a way that helps make your Web site most accessible to search engines. You want to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to find out what your site is about because the more relevant your site is to a user's search query, the higher your site is likely to show up in the search results.

Understanding What a Search Engine Sees as Keywords

In this section, we take a step back first and talk about what search engines really see as keywords. When someone enters a search query, the search engine looks for those words in its index. Here are some general things the search engine looks for:

• Web pages that contain the exact phrase.

• Web pages that have all the words of the phrase in close proximity to each other.

• Web pages that contain all the words, although not close together.

• Web pages that contain other forms of the words (such as customize instead of customization). This is called stemming.

• Web pages that have links pointing to them from other pages, in which the link text contains the ...