Keep Your Keywords Page Specific

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

For most websites, the page that draws the most amount of traffic is the home page. It makes sense; the homepage is you introducing your website to the visitor. It’s the face of your online brand and is often the page that gets linked to by outside sources. But you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket and stuff all your keywords onto the landing page. You shouldn’t be putting all your keywords on any one page at all.

Keywords should always be page specific and based on the content of that particular page. Let’s say you run a dress boutique that sells wedding and prom dresses. Why would you try to incorporate prom dress keywords into the wedding dress page? A girl looking for her prom dress is probably in high school and marriage is a long way off. She isn’t looking for “the dress,” she’s looking for the latest is prom dress fashion. Bringing the prom dress shopper to your wedding dress page provides a bad user-experience and might make the visitor feel like they’ve been tricked.

A good rule of thumb is to identify and incorporate 2-5 keywords per page. Again, they have to be based on the content of that page. Back to our dress boutique; they may offer custom tailoring services, but those keywords should only appear on the tailoring services page of the site. They may talk about their tailoring services on the homepage content, but those keywords shouldn’t be the main focus.

If you aren’t sure what keywords you should be targeting on each page, take at look at your analytics. This will tell you what people are searching for that drew them to that page of your site. Pick a few of the top ranking ones and plug those into the Google keyword research tool to find appropriate variations to consider incorporating. Take your big list of keywords and scrub them down until you get the 5 best options.

Don’t over-stuff your content with keywords, regardless of how relevant. They should be seamlessly integrated into the content in a way that feels natural for the reader.