Original Research

Key word placing in Web page body text to increase visibility to search engines

W. T. Kritzinger, M. Weideman
South African Journal of Information Management | Vol 9, No 1 | a16 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/sajim.v9i1.16 | © 2007 W. T. Kritzinger, M. Weideman | This work is licensed under CC Attribution 4.0
Submitted: 02 November 2007 | Published: 02 November 2007

About the author(s)

W. T. Kritzinger, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa
M. Weideman, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa

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Abstract

The growth of the World Wide Web has spawned a wide variety of new information sources, which has also left users with the daunting task of determining which sources are valid. Many users rely on the Web as an information source because of the low cost of information retrieval. It is also claimed that the Web has evolved into a powerful business tool. Examples
include highly popular business services such as Amazon.com and Kalahari.net. It is estimated that around 80% of users utilize search engines to locate information on the Internet. This, by implication, places emphasis on the underlying importance of Web pages being listed on search engines indices. Empirical evidence that the placement of key words in certain areas of the body text will have an influence on the Web sites' visibility to search engines could not be found in the literature. The result of two experiments indicated that key words should be concentrated towards the top, and diluted towards the bottom of a Web page to increase visibility. However, care should be taken in terms of key word density, to prevent
search engine algorithms from raising the spam alarm.

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