the CSS information needed to ensure that the design of the site — from text to layout — is consis-
tent across all pages of the site.If you’re manually coding your web site (writing the HTML yourself, instead of using predesigned
sites from some application like Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe Dreamweaver), you would use CSS to
ensure that your site is consistent from page to page. The nice aspect of CSS is that you can change
your header sizes to suit your needs.Unfortunately, some less-than-honest SEOs have determined that CSS can be used to artificially
implant header tags into a web site in a way that doesn’t actually change the size of the text included
in the header tag. However, using this method to “fool” search crawlers into seeing more headings
than are actually on a page could backfire, leaving you much lower in the rankings than you would
prefer to be.Body text
Body textis that text visible to readers of your site, but not included in a header. When you look at
the pages of this book, for example, the text that’s between headings is the body text. It’s the same
for web pages.Although you’ve already used keywords in several places on your web site, body text is another
place where you’ll want to include your keywords when possible. There is no hard-and-fast rule
on the number of times that your keywords should appear on a page, but a good rule of thumb is
that you use them about once every paragraph or two, on the condition that they make sense in
the content of the site.What many people who are optimizing their sites don’t realize is that all the strategies for SEO can
be overdone, including the use of your keywords in the body text of your site. You should use these
words regularly in your text, but don’t use them out of context or just as a ploy to improve your
search engine standings. If the keywords don’t work in the normal flow of the text on the page, don’t
include them. Nonsense will gain you no points at all with search engine crawlers.Body text should be placed into your web site using the body-text tags: <body>Insert Body
Te x t</body>. These are not the only body-text tags that you’ll use, however. In addition to the
tags that indicate where your body text begins and ends, there are also tags that indicate special
formatting in text. Those tags are:<b>Bold</b>
<i>Italics</i>
<strong>Strongly Emphasized</strong>
<em>Emphasis</em>
<li>New Line in List</li>Each of these tags indicates special formatting for the word or phrase within the opening and closing
tags, and the special emphasis makes a search engine crawler take notice of those words. Therefore,
if you can use keywords within those tags, you should try to. But the same rule applies to these108
Part II SEO Strategies
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