want to read the text on your pages, and especially the introductory text near the top of the page. This mirrors the way human beings assess pages — by reading them, starting at the top.

Provide text. Pages without text rarely gain high rankings. This is especially important for home pages. If there's no text on the opening page then the spider might stop right there and not even bother to look at the rest of your site. It's one reason for avoiding Splash pages at the front end. Ideally you should provide at least 150 words of text on your home page.

Make full use of early paragraphs to include relevant keywords. Most search engines place emphasis on early text, and less on the words further down the page. The numbers vary from engine to engine, but you can assume the first 50 words are crucial, the next 50 are important, the 50 following are likely to be read. After that, it's anybody's guess, though some engines do manage to fully index pages with more than a thousand words. Try to get your important keywords — the expressions you expect your visitors to use in their searches — included in your first 150.

Don't overdo any repetition. If you repeat your keywords too often, you could be penalized. There's no magic number to aim for, but if you repeat keywords three times or less, you should be safe.