by Urban Lindstedt, Freelance journalist and consultant specializing in search engine marketing and blogs 

Search engine optimization is basically about publishing interesting content on your Web site. Good content creates traffic and references from other sites, which is what is needed to be successful in Google.

One of the most important things is to write for your target group, not for search engines, and it is possible to adjust text for search engines without losing readers. Keywords and phrases that you think are important for your readers should be repeated several times on the page and should appear in the first 150-250 characters of the page, preferably at the beginning of paragraphs.

The key phrases should be used naturally; there's not much point having many visitors to your Web site if they can't read the text. The ideal is to have 250 to 500 words on your page and it is best if your texts clearly focus on one subject. Key phrases should, however, be repeated moderately, as otherwise the reader may go to another site. If the same keyword is repeated all too often, search engines may assess the site as spam and lower the page ranking. The keyword density—the amount of keywords on a page divided by the total amount of words on the page—should be 2-8 percent. For example, if your page has 100 words, between two and eight of them should be keywords.

Visitors don't read Web pages, they browse them, and readability is increased if you use clear subject-oriented titles, headings and keywords in bulleted lists. This structure also works well for search engines, as long as the correct keyword is included. Search engines assess words in headings, bulleted lists and marked as bold as more important than other body text.

The optimization should not outweigh the main purpose of the text, for example selling a home surround sound system, getting leads to you consultancy or attracting a lot of readers that stay on the site for a long time. Pages that are over-optimized will not produce any links to the page, which is of decisive importance for the page ranking.

There is no point filling a page with important keywords and phrases. It is better to use three to five key phrases on each page. Organize the site into subject categories and have one page for each subject or phrase that you want to optimize, where the text focuses on the subject.

Thoughts about search engine optimization

Everyone should take search engines into consideration—corporate leaders, marketing managers, Webmasters, small business owners and "bloggers". Visitors that come to us from search engines have actively shown that they are interested in the content of our site, and are closer to buying than someone that has seen a banner or advertising film. Search engines have become the cheapest way for advertisers to attract new customers. The fact that it is also possible to measure exactly how profitable the advertisement is is also an important success factor for search engine marketing.