ARTICLES FOR WEBMASTERS 
 Keywords and Body Content
Keywords are the means by which search engines match queries to
websites. The words a user types in during a query are compared against
those indexed for websites. Where there is a match, the site is listed
as a result for that query. Other factors such as site popularity, age
and size also affect the outcome, but keywords form the core of the
matching process.
There are many different locations on a web page where keywords can be
included. It is often thought that the 'keywords' meta tag is the
essential place to focus on during design, however it has been so
abused that search engines attribute little credibility to it, and some
don't index it at all. One of the most important places to include
keywords is in the body content of your website. This is where the page
content that the user wants to see will be found. It is reasonable,
therefore, that the keywords and search terms will be found here also.
When including keywords in the body content, it is important that they
are included as they would occur naturally, and are not used too often.
Search engines have intelligent algorithms that will know if particular
words are over-used compared with normal usage, and your site will be
penalized if this is found to be the case. Use keywords intelligently
and naturally, and your website will be acceptable to the algorithms.
As with other tags, words found at the start of text are deemed to be
more important than words found at the end of the text. Your body text
should therefore start with keywords. Having created the starting set
of words, write the rest of the page content, including the keywords
naturally in the text throughout the page. Finish off the text by
including the keywords in a closing sentence or comment. Wherever you
include keywords, be careful not to be seen to be 'stuffing' keywords
in the text too often.
Keywords should also be included in other tags within the body. It is
important that they are used in hyperlinks and image tags, and anywhere
they can naturally be added. Keywords used in free body text are
particularly important as this text is the true content of the website.
The quantity of text on the page is also an indicator of the relevance
of that page to a search query. A page with little text will be viewed
as having less worth than a page with more content. A higher volume of
text on the page will also make it easier for you to distribute
keywords evenly and appropriately throughout the page. Where there is
less text, there will be fewer opportunities to include keywords, and
you may be tempted to include more than would be wise when analyzed by
search engine spiders.
It is a reasonable assumption by the search engine planners that a web
page with content that is relevant to a query will have the query text
distributed through it, and occurring at appropriate intervals. The
task of the website developer is to create an acceptable quantity of
meaningful content, and to include keywords that are statistically
acceptable to search engine algorithms and grammatically acceptable to
those reading the text. Master this, and you will have a skill many
website developers will envy.
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