Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is often also the best method of site promotion. To determine how your page can achieve the highest ranking on the sweet-spot keywords, you will need to look at the HTML source code of the pages to see what the others are doing.

 Search on one of your keywords, and click on the top site for that search. Select the View Source command in your Web browser, and a window should be displayed showing the HTML of the page. When I executed the View Source command against this page, the source code appeared.

The native View Source command in Internet Explorer launches the HTML code in Notepad. You can find instructions for changing this selection on the Web (you have to edit the registry). Alternately, if you haven’t looked at the Mozilla Firefox browser already, it has an excellent HTML source parser built in. In Firefox, the View Source command opens a window that shows the HTML color formatted for easy reading. It makes examining HTML code painless.

You must now determine how the site placed so highly. The following factors generally lead to high placement:

❑       Large number of links to site — If the site has a large number of Web sites in the related topic area that link to it, a search engine will take this as a sign not only of popularity but also usefulness. Search engines judge a page by the company it keeps. When a large number of related Web sites think a page is valuable enough to link to it, a search engine recognizes it. Use the Google Toolbar to check the Page Rank to get an estimate of the link backs.

❑       Keywords in the title text — Keywords found in the <title> tags typically rank much higher than the keywords located at other places on the site.

❑       Keywords in <H1> headings — If the keywords are located in heading 1 (<H1> tags) text, the search engine determines that they are important to the site. If the heading keywords match the keywords in the page title, it considers them even more important.

❑       Keywords bolded, italicized, or underlined — Keywords that have special font styling are seen as important to the page.

❑       Number of times keywords are included — When the page contains repetitions of the keywords, that signals the search engine spider. Keep in mind, however, that search engine programs have become much more adept at determining when the keyword has been “spammed” on the page or repeated many times without relevance. This will hurt your ranking, rather then help it.

❑       Keywords at the beginning and end of article — Keywords appearing at both the beginning and end of the content will increase the page’s ranking.

Examine the source of the top pages for these items. How many of them are present on the page? Execute the Find command (Ctrl+F in most View Source windows) and see how many times the keywords appear in the page. Where do they appear? After examining a few of the top-ranked pages for the search term, you should begin to see a pattern that explains how the search engine program chose those pages.

Repeat this process with your other sweet-spot keywords. By the time you are finished, you should have a good idea of how to make sure that your Joomla page imitates all of the strategies these sites used to achieve effective keyword placement.