Pay attention to the bones of your Site: File Names

Well, I just went back and checked in to my Google webmaster tools account and discovered something very strange for this real estate and local centric website for La Quinta, CA…

I was totally confused why this site had so many different terms that it ranked for for “Skeleton”… Well I did some digging and realized that when I built the site, I had added the background image with the file name “images/skeleton.gif”. The rest of the site has NOTHING to do with skeletons but here Google is giving rankings for a wide mix of terms related to the main content of the page, as well as for terms related to skeletons! For example Google webmaster tools showed me ranking 48 for [Jack Skeleton] from Nightmare Before Christmas, as well as [skeleton in desert] which seemed to have used the geographic context along with the filename. The lesson here for your site is that filen ames are one of the many factors in how Google understands your website, so do everything you can to name them appropriately!

Google recently modified it’s webmaster tools interface to be more user friendly and convey more information about how Google ranks your site. The best part of this is that Google now displays a list of the top 100 keywords, in order of importance on your site. This allows you to see what words Googlebot understands to be the most important words on your site, and that will directly affect your likelihood of being placed in a keyword search for that term. Obviously, if your primary keyword was intended to be, “content writing”, and it either doesn’t show up on that list or is number 99, you need to take a closer look at your content.

Common sense and Googlebot

So Googlebot reads over you page and your keyword is not in your top 10 keywords, what am I not doing right? Well, you should sit down and actually read through the content on your site as if you were coming to your site from a Google search. Now obviously, if you were searching for “content writing advice”, you’d expect that the site that you arrive at actually uses that word in several contexts. On the other hand, you don’t want to end up on a page that just full of that one word, spammed dozens of times across the page. You want to reach a good “Keyword Density“, that isn’t too spammy, but also reflects well when Google reads the page. Just use common sense, and you’ll get your keywords ranking in the order that will best benefit you and your placement.