Understanding how to use keywords in your web page’s content will help you in getting your site to rank higher in the search engines. Chances are, if you haven’t done any keyword research or optimization following, you aren’t ranking very well to begin with. There are many aspects to this subject: let’s examine some of them and how you can implement them!
Do Your Research! – The first step when putting up anything that you want to be found in the Web is to do some basic keyword research. This is a topic worthy of a much lengthier treatment, so I’ll just sketch out some broad guidelines here.
- Think like a searcher. What would you type in to find you?
- Use the Google Adwords Tool as a starting place for research.
- Find out how competitive your terms are (in general terms) by typing terms you find into a Google search box in “quotes”. This will tell you in rough terms how many sites are optimizing that term. Less than 50,000 is a good number to shoot for.
- Use some of the popular “spy” tools out there (like Spyfu!) to see what keywords your competitors are using.
- Start with a smaller list, say 10-20 keyword phrases to begin with, and eventually keep adding to that list, as your site grows.
- When starting out, try to find “long tail” keyword phrases; that is, phrases that have a decent amount of search volume but are not overly competitive.
What Do I Do Now?
Once you’ve come up with some keyword phrases you want to run with, you need to know how to best use them in your content. Here are a few ways that are essential.
- Use keywords in your title tags.
- Use them in titles of posts and articles.
- Sprinkle them throughout your articles and posts, shooting for about 1% keyword density. There is a lot of debate about how much is too much. Write naturally. If it comes up more than that, don’t sweat it. You need to write content geared to the readers!
- Employ your keywords in URLs whenever possible. This is not always practical, but helpful when you can.
- Use them in site or blog categories.
- Make sure to use them as anchor text, both within your site and in incoming links to your site.
- Put them as tags in your content, and in videos that are either on your site or link to your site’s pages.
- By all means, use your keywords in any linking campaigns you are running to your site. He who has the most relevant incoming links wins!
Making sure you employ as many of these “best practices” as possible will give you a fighting chance at ranking for keywords you’d like to be found for. When the search engines get an idea what you’re all about, and you start getting incoming keyword links to your pages, rankings will follow!
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