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January 02, 2012 at 11:00 PM
When it comes to rising to the top of the results pages of search engines such as Google or Bing, there are two basic approaches: “white hat” search engine optimization, or SEO (think of the good guys in the old Westerns) and “black hat” SEO (the bad guys in the same genre).
White hat SEO: Long-tail keyword phrases and keyword density. SEO begins when you create a list of preferred keywords, often referred to as trophy words. Examples might include: “New York Liability Insurance,” “New England Business Insurance,” “New Jersey Truck Insurance” or “Professional Liability Insurance.” These phrases are known as long-tail keywords and should appear on your website in a variety of ways.
Once your agency has determined the best keyword phrases (after reviewing them in Google AdWords or other keyword analytics tool), your agency should populate your website using your preferred keywords. This needs to be accomplished in your metadata (description, meta keywords, page title, etc.) and in the actual website content.
Your agency should also measure on-page keyword density. Each page should be optimized for one to three phrases. Many experts consider 5 percent to 6 percent to be the optimum density for the major search engines. Proper keyword density, meta best practices, quality inbound links and a robust social-media marketing initiative will yield positive results for your agency’s web-marketing plans.
Black hat SEO. This brings us to our first black hat “don’t”: keyword stuffing. Continuously repeating your keyword phrase (“Texas Business Insurance,” for example) to achieve an abnormally high density is known as keyword stuffing. Search engines eventually take note of this tactic and marginalize the webpage, causing inferior rankings.
