Fig­ure 1: Num­ber 1!

This will be the final SEO Soft­ware Design Guru post. I’m num­ber one. This post con­tains the how. It’s so strange that in a busi­ness so ratio­nal as soft­ware design or web design or any­thing else related to soft­ware, the actual tac­tics of the SEO’er is try­ing to fig­ure out the Google black­box. So we prod that giant with our tools, list­ing our key­words in excel sheets, which some­how sound extremely archaic to me. And as we rise to the top of the SERPs it kinda keeps me won­der­ing what power mr. Google has over us.

Ranks.nl to the Rescue

Any­way enough rumi­nat­ing. Before I got to the top I sat there star­ing at the num­ber one posi­tion want­ing to know more SEO to kick that post to king­dom come. My coun­try­men from ranks.nl came to the res­cue. Turns out they haven’t changed the look of their web­site from when the inter­net saw day­light for the first time. Their tools are pretty nifty nonethe­less. I used the key­word den­sity analyser and found out the promi­nence for “soft­ware design guru” was under 30% whereas my com­peti­tor had 97%. There’s the option to search for par­tic­u­lar key phrases and that’s what I did. This is also a great way to stake out the com­pe­ti­tion to find out how the tool rates them on par­tic­u­lar key­words and what you could do about it.

SEO: how much is enough?

Al lot of SEO ques­tions revolve around the ques­tion of how much actual (on-page) SEO will do the trick. Although that’s impos­si­ble to say I’ve heard Andy Jenk­ins men­tion a cou­ple of best practices:

• What are your SEO com­peti­tors doing?
• SEO your page accord­ingly which means,
• Use that many keywords
• Get their back­links (for those who don’t know where to look for back­links, install the Google tool­bar which is be an ardu­ous task

You get the point. If you want to reach a cer­tain goal look at what the (SEO) peo­ple are doing who are already on top and do the same. Not try­ing to invent the wheel your­self. That way your efforts will prob­a­bly have the most return on invest­ment. SEO is a zero sum game. Your either some­where, mean­ing page 1 to 5 of a key­word with a high search vol­u­men, or your nowhere at all.

The SEO Promi­nence Factor

The SEO promi­nence fac­tor has got to do with the quan­tity of your key­words and their prox­im­ity to the start of the page. Some­thing Brad Fal­lon coined “how early and often you key­words are shown”. So what I did was increase it with­out look­ing overly unnat­ural. Obvi­ously such a post with­out the obvi­ous topic of SEO would look ridicu­lous. Here are a cou­ple of sta­tis­tics to throw at you. You might have heard them before but rep­e­ti­tion is the mother of skill. These are also the fac­tors you’ll find in the Key­word Den­sity Analiser Tool from Ranks.nl:

• Title tag
• H tags (H1, H2 etc)
• em tags (bold & italic)
• body text
• lists (ordered & unordered)
• Site Struc­ture (on site link structure)

Ranks.nl gives you great sta­tis­tics. Here are a cou­ple of screen­shots from the Key­word Den­sity Analiser alone!

Fig­ure 2: sta­tis­tics for main keywords

Fig­ure 2: key­word den­sity sta­tis­tics for each word found on the page

Good luck with your own SEO, it’s tough and requires a lot of hard work, the major­ity of peo­ple on the inter­net frown upon it, but the rewards are worth the price.

Related posts:

1. SEO tips #2: Soft­ware Design Guru
2. SEO tips #3: Soft­ware Design Guru Update
3. SEO tips #1: Soft­ware Design­ers in Dire Straits
4. Soft­ware Project Phase 1.2: Draft­ing the Soft­ware Design