Where and How to Add Keywords to Your Site…

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, December 28, 2007 Comments (4)

Keywords in your content is one of the most important parts of Search engine optimization. Knowing what keywords to use is only part of the battle. To reach number one you have to use them correctly to make they appearance count the best.

It takes a lot of words to convince a search engine that you are a subject matter expert. Also, most sites use images to relay their message to humans, but are now discovering that search engines are blind and do not see images. Or the site content comes from a data base and the data base has little unique content. Or the site accepts feeds from other expert sites but this makes all of their content someone else’s, and they either get no credit for it or are penalized for duplicate content. In any case, the design and content on your web site may very well need to be restructured and expanded. [If this is not you, buy yourself a drink — you have earned it!] Avoid mistakes, use clean optimized graphics and do it right, minimize the use of flash, avoid pop-up windows, restrict the scope of forms except where really needed, make javascript and css files external to the source code, always use a site map, solve obvious problems first, and by all means keep it simple. Web page layout problems really hurt SEO projects.

So where do you add keywords? It is important that your page TITLE be as descriptive as possible of what you do and that it contain your top few keywords, but generally fewer than 12 words. Listings that include the dominant search terms in the META TITLE and META description tags have a higher ranking and a higher clickthrough rate (often more than double the traffic) than those that do not! Use these keywords to make up your Search Engine Optimization targets. Also, review your content to add these keywords, especially two- and three-word phrases, into the content without losing the message. This is important for a search engine that does not reference META tags. You want to use these phrases time and again without spamming a search engine. Some search engines take site descriptions from within the page, not from the Meta description fields. Such a search engine will exclude some appropriate keywords unless you use them throughout your content. And try to keep the title and description fields as short as possible to prevent you from diluting the keyword impact.

Additionally, it is good to practice a basic rule: begin each word in your META keywords list with an initial capital letter. There has been a lot of discussion about the continued use of META tags. META tags (actually the major HEAD section tags) we consider important to Search Engine Optimization. What is not known is what is meant when it is said that search engines “ignore” a META tag. Our research is that they are not ignored and that they actually do count. It is commonly known that the title is vital, and that the description is often used as an abstract, but thought that the keyword tag is ignored. Knowing the history of spammer abuse for these tags, it would not be surprising to find them of lesser importance than before, and that perhaps words are ignored if and only if they do not appear in the content of the page — but they are used if they are in the content. Is selectively ignoring words the same as being “ignored”? And if you were a search engine wouldn’t you tell spammers not to bother?

Even if tags are ignored today, it only takes a few minutes to do it right, you would never be penalized for having them (unless you spam), and not all engines will ignore them and maybe not forever. You can never go wrong by using META tags, and only hurt yourself if you don’t use them.

You must also unconditionally, absolutely, positively have keywords throughout your body section. It is recommended that you have at least 400 words of clean, grammatically correct sentence-structure content on every page. You must also have your keywords appear as the most common (without excess) phrases on your pages. In many cases there are ways to do this that work well for whatever your page format or content, all of which is customized to the look-and-feel of the site and the nature of the content.

And you also need to link pages together using the keywords of the landing page in the anchor text of the sending page. This is a must… use text links within paragraphs when possible, especially when the pages are related. If the topics are not related, then you should still use relative anchor text for the page you are sending the user to.

Comments (4)                      Category: Content Development                      

Read similar posts in Content Development

• Building a Successful Ecommerce Website
• Why Content on a Website is So Important
• What Great Content Really Means
• Industry News Can Create New Content
• HTML 5 May Have Security Challenges

Subscribe to our RSS feed