How often to use keyword phrases within a web page layout is not an exact science. It's known as keyword density and a section that deals with it is at: Keyword DensityThe keyword density that's acceptable varies from one engine to another, but you can get some guidance through the use of software tools. These can analyze your page layout giving suggestions based on the latest information available on what's acceptable to the various engine's. The exact details of what and where any 'spider' looks for information about a web page layout and the weighting (importance) it gives to them is a closely guarded secret. The software developers spend hours doing tests using the engine's to figure out what works best and try to keep track of changes by the engine's as they find them. This can save you hours of your own trial and error. They make these changes available to you as frequent updates to the software.
Some 'spiders' also look at the Alt tags associated with images in a web page layout. This is the small label that appears in a browser window when you move the mouse over an area of the image. The html would be <img src="your image" width="X" height="Y" alt="image name"> If you've active navigation buttons on the page layout you would often include an Alt tag image name to indicate to a human viewer what function that button image serves. This is done in the event that the image does not load into the browser. Since 'spiders' can't read the labels on navigation image buttons it uses the Alt tag to tell it what the image is for. You can therefore use the alt tag in a layout to include keyword phrases, but again don't over do it.
Of increasing importance with some engine's is what an active link says about the landing page of that link. It determines this from the file name of the page and the text in the link. Remember the 'spider' only reads text, so using navigation buttons in your layout with Java Applets, Java Scripts or Flash, means the 'spider' will not see them. It will be as if there are no links to other pages even though you do, at least for the human visitor. A 'spider' likes to see a simple text link <a href="url of keyword landing page">keyword link text</a> With this text link the 'spiders' will read the URL of the landing page (where the link goes) and the link text. You can use a keyword phrase in the URL as well as the link text. This tells the 'spider' what the current page it's looking at says about the page it's about to visit (using your link). If a web page layout has incoming links from other pages and these pages say in the link text and URL "pink elephants" it's another indicator to the 'spider' the page is indeed about "pink elephants." It's important to realize that your web page layout needs to include links the search engine visitors can read and follow and a different set of links for human visitors to read and follow. It's one reason you'll see text links on a web page ( often at the bottom of the layout ) and also image links to the same pages.
Another method that's recommended is using a site map with simple text links to each page in your web site layout. This way you can still have the graphical links for the human visitors and the site map links for the search engine visitors. There are of course other ways to achieve the same result but that's for the more advanced and at this stage I just want to keep it simple. The links I've talked about so far have been internal, from web pages within your own site being linked to other web pages on site. But there are also external links from other web sites that may have a link to your web site. What these links say about your web page, can be more important to some search engine's, than what your own links say. External links are also more difficult to control in terms of what's used in the link text. So your best advantage is to ensure the keyword phrase is in the page URL. The other web site must use this URL link to a page even if they use something else in the link text. Of course, if they use a link the 'spiders' can't read or follow, then it won't really matter anyway. Next: Web page layout for the search engine visitor - Part 3 | 
