Strategic keyword placement increases site visibility
1. Create order: On-page optimization includes making the structure of your site clean, easy to navigate and highly visible (through correct code, links and meta data) to the search engine spiders. Your keywords should support these efforts. Stuffing all your keywords into your home page is not effective. Think about how the search engines crave theme and order; and how a web user refines their search the closer they get to purchase (see our Search Process article). Your website should reflect this hierarchy of cascading information. Your home page, by its very nature, is likely to be fairly generic, and more appropriate for using your broader theme or category keyword descriptions. The rest of your site should be structured to explore more specific sub-categories within a clear framework. If you have a travel site for example, you may be talking about holidays in general on the home page, subsequent pages might talk about certain types of holiday i.e. beach, with sub-pages investigating products or locations. You can then create keyword clusters throughout your site that will generate pockets of strength and relevance for the search engines, resulting in more of your site being crawled more often. Be careful not to dilute your keywords by trying to target too many unrelated words in one area.
Strategically clustering your keywords hierarchically throughout your site will also help with inbound links. Bloggers and webmasters prefer to link to particular articles or pages rather than generic home pages and deep links to certain sections of your site will lend further relevance and strength overall.
2. Get to the point: When it comes to SEO, it pays to be direct. Highly creative writing on a website is all well and good, but a search engine does not currently have the ability to make conceptual or suggestive leaps like that of a human brain. Search engines do not read between the lines. For example, if you are talking aspirationally about your holiday company using phrases such as ‘time to unwind’ etc, the chances are the search engines will not relate you to holidays, but you might get returned in a search for easy listening music. To that end, your headlines and priority text should contain your targeted words and phrases. The words that are important to you and directly relevant to your site should be your focus as they will tell the search engines what your article or page is about. Using clear explanation and words related to your theme will help them do this quicker. Examples of proper keyword placement include:
Keywords in URLs: Your URL is a key descriptor of your site. If possible you should have your keyword forming part of your URL in order to help with SERPs rankings.
Keywords in title tags: The search engines place more importance on page titles than subsequent text. Putting your keyword at the start of your title will immediately tell the search engine’s what that page is about. What’s written in your title tag also shows up as the page title in the search results listing.
Keywords in headings: Headlines also carry more weight in the search engine’s eyes. Using HTML H1, H2 etc headings makes your content more visible to the spiders and enables clearer categorisation of your site content.
Keywords in anchor text: Using your keywords in link descriptions, i.e. your anchor text is another way of getting your keywords into your site content without appearing repetitive. Anchor texts provide more clues to the search engines as to the content of your linking pages.
Keywords in body text: While we’ve established you should be clear and ‘themed’ as far as the search engines go, you should be careful in terms of overdoing it with overuse of your keywords. Not only will this provide difficult reading for the user, but the search engines will punish excessive ‘keyword stuffing’. Keyword ‘density’ is a term used to describe the percentage of keywords you have in an article in proportion to other text. Over 10% of core keywords in an article is thought to start looking suspicious to the search engines. But common sense needs to feature here anyway, if a piece becomes difficult or frustrating to read, there is less likelihood of it ever getting linked to so you really need to be writing for the web user and not the search engines.
Keywords in alt tags: The search engines cannot read images. What may look nice or be highly explanatory to a web user, may be completely invisible to the spiders. It is important to include an image description with any image you post to make it ‘readable’ for the search engines, and adding your keyword to this makes sense. However, you need avoid the temptation to stuff the alt tag with keywords and should make sure the description is still relevant to the image itself.
Keywords in meta tags: This is less important, especially as far as Google is concerned. However, writing a good meta description for each page is good practice and lends some added relevancy to each page. Again, beware of keyword stuffing as it will do more harm than good.
Read more about on-page optimization and how to make your site visible and accessible to the search engines.