If after optimization, your page’s content sounds natural to a human visitor, it will probably appear valid to a search engine spider. However, don’t forget that the bots are still machines, and they analyze specific aspects of your text. Mainly, you should pay attention to the following properties:

1. Weight, also known as Density: This is the percentage of your key phrases in a given area, such as a META tag, or a page.

2. Prominence: This refers to how close your keyword is to the beginning of the analyzed area.

3. Frequency: This is the absolute number of the times a certain keyword is repeated in an area or another. Unlike Density, Frequency does not depend on the total number of words in the text.

4. Proximity: This refers to the distance between parts of your key phrase. While it’s always better to use a complete phrase, sometimes the language structure doesn’t allow this to happen. You’ll still have to keep the words as close as they can be in this case.

There are many cloaking techniques, including IP based, User Agent based, and doorway pages. IP based cloaking detects the IP of a visitor, and if it’s a search engine spider, redirects it to an optimized, but not user-friendly page. User Agent based cloaking accomplishes the same thing, except that it differentiates between visitors according to the software they use to reach the site, since robots use their specific settings. Doorway pages are somewhat different. They are basically keyword-stuffed for search engines, but when a visitor reaches the page, it either redirects them immediately to another page, or requires them to click a link to “enter the site.” Keep away from cloaking, unless you want to be banned after a week of getting to the top.

Declare the character encoding you use in the META "Content-Type" tag of every page. However, from then on you’ll have to follow the character set you’ve chosen. Failing to do so may damage your ranking since the page will be considered technically flawed.

If you’re using cascading style sheets (CSS) or JavaScript, move them from your actual page to an external file, and embed them through a SRC link. Search engine spiders are rumored to place a slight penalty when the textual amount of scripts is bigger than the amount of actual “crawlable” content.

Don’t use the META Refresh tag to redirect visitors. Most search engines will consider it spam, especially if it redirects right away. You could use ASP, PHP, or another such technology for this purpose, or change the ".htaccess" file to use the “301” redirect, meaning that the site moved permanently. An example of this would be: Redirect 301 /old-page.htm http://www.somesite.com/new-page.htm

One of our very successful SEO friends asked me to share this…

Where a keyword appears in the text can be as important as how often you use it.

Try to place over 50% of your keyword usage in the first couple paragraphs of the body text without stuffing (55% to 75% is typically ideal). This can be tricky, but well worth the effort.

If, for example, you used "New Hampshire real estate" as a keyword phrase seven times throughout the page, try to break it down like this:

4 mentions in the first two paragraphs

2 mentions in the next paragraph or two

1 mention in a paragraph toward the bottom of the page

Natural Text Flow

Please keep in mind that it’s becoming more and more important to try to keep your text in a natural language sort of flow.

Many search engines are on the look out for blocky sentences and phrases that are not combined in a natural order.

Mark your keywords by putting bold, italics, or underlined tags around them. Note that it is better to use instead of for this purpose.

Always try to have a minimum of 100 visible words on each page, but having 250-300 is even better. Some engines penalize your page if it lacks textual content.

Keep in mind that while image tables are easy to use and organize, they are harder to optimize. Exchanging them for CSS positioning often allows far more control during SEO.

Search Engine spiders don’t click buttons, so if you are using them as links, be sure to provide an alternative for the bots to reach your pages. JavaScript isn’t good for your links either. This especially concerns navigation lists, menus, and such. However, it is completely normal to use it for image rollovers in your navbar.