Good SEO?

[Malok]

the Title of the article helps more than having say those 10 keywords in your article.

Are you certain? Theres an ongoing discussion about it in this thread:
http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/...ad.php?t=16688

[jihni]

the Title of the article helps more than having say those 10 keywords in your article.

Yeah. If your title catches your readers' attention, your article has a bigger chance of being read by your prospective clients.

[rei.wired]

Putting them at the footer would make it look like keyword stuffing. Your readers won't like it and would most likely turn to other pages. It would all be a waste of your time as this won't convert really well. And of course search engines really don't like that.

Your pages must always cater to both the search engines and end users.

[Maui]

Putting keywords on the footer? That looks very spammy. If the keywords fit within the content of your article and it reads well, then by all means use them. In writing articles/posts, you are writing for the benefit of the reader (sure, SEO is a nice fringe benefit, by but no means the only objective).

[Gary Halbert]

If you can swing it, putting your keywords in your URL is a strong contender in search rankings too.

It is necessary to have the keywords appear in the text, but as others have said, it must read naturally. My understanding from SEO gurus is that it is only necessary to put them in the first para, the middle of the text and the last para, but as one poster said, it may gain you between 1 and 10 % ranking points. Content and one way links rate much more highly. The more web pages you have helps too.

[BrandonD]

To the author: Footer links can look spammy. I'd focus on only linking to inner pages of your site in the footer, and using varying anchors when interlinking on your site.

[sky73]

Barry- are you asking about the footer on a blog post or the bottom of an article posted on a website? Maybe your're referring to the very bottom footer on the main site page? Just add the targeted keywords in your title, and a few times in the blog post or article. Once in the first paragraph, and in the middle of the blog post or article. Also on the last parapraph. Make sure to include related keywords into the blog post or article (creating a keyword related theme). A few IM tools to use are google keyword tool, google wonder wheel, and google "related searches" to help gather a keyword related theme. Just make sure the finished blog post or article is original, informative (adds value) and easy to read...

[zcoplan]

The URL is also very important for search engines, much more important than keyword density. I agree that using lots of h2 and h3 tags is great and keeping it simple and easy to read will help with your bounce rate.

[century21gka]

I've always hated the term "keyword" except as a metatag targeted at old-fashioned search engines that didn't work very well.

Type your search engine query into Google and take a look at your competition.

Just write your article. Make it sound natural, something people will like to skim (and maybe read). Have brief paragraphs. Use headers in bold type so people can skim easily. Your page will have both a description and a title and you can work your targeted search queries in there, too -- but don't make your text sound stupid because you want to say CITY HOMES and CITY REAL ESTATE over and over.

Once, several few years ago, I was at the convenience store and picked up FHM magazine because there was some actress on the cover I liked. They have these little articlets all over the place for the attention-span-impaired and it was BRILLIANT writing for the web (even though it was in a magazine).

You have to automatically assume that NO ONE is going to read the entire thing (though the occasional person really will read it). People SCAN on the web. They don't read. If you're uninteresting as a scan, they use their back button rather quickly to get back to search results and click on something else. Your competition.

If you're interesting as a scan and not too spammy and/or confusing, they may stick around.

Never thought of it that way. Definitely going to approach my website now with that in mind. Makes it a lot easier to write too if you write succinct stories instead of trying to write out an elaborate 500+ word page.

[JohnWoodward]

Write to educate, inform, or amuse. If you write for just key words, it doesn't sound natural. If your content is interesting and informative, folks will com back. I put together some retirement pages and found one day a newsletter had linked to it and I had a huge amount of traffic from it I never expected.