Here’s a fun exercise for the beginning web marketer: Use a web-browser such as Firefox which allows you to view the source code of any web page. Now search Google for random terms. Visit the first three non-paid sites that came up for that term, and view the page’s source code. How did they get ranked to the top for that keyword?
We have a shell script to generate random search words, but there’s plenty of online tools out there, such as Random Word Generator, Banana Slug, or Random Google Page.
Our observations: About half the time, you come up with either Wikipedia or Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary or another online dictionary as the first link. With other site results, sometimes it’s obviously a matter of PageRank more than internal document information.
If you do view the source of the page, try doing a simple text search for the keyword. You’ll be surprised sometimes to find that a given page used no meta tags to speak of, but either had the keyword within the links or image file names – “invisible” stuff that the user wouldn’t see!
There’s also any of the keyword density tools here, which will count up the text of a page for you. But try not to make it feel like “work”!
Peter Brittain
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