This is the second part in the Keywords guide to making your own web fairydust and here I’m going to list the places where you can put your keywords to make it easy for the search engine bots to find them.

Again, the first thing is to decide on the keywords – there is no point optimising pages for keywords that people are not actually using to search.

The second thing to remember is to make sense and be relevant. It may seem obvious, but a rush of blood to the head could lead to a rash of keywords on the web page. So, place them so that your content still makes sense for the visitor to read.

1. Domain Name

Having a keyword in your domain name is a great way to get a head start in SEO, although this is not always possible. For example, with www.duanebridal.com you know immediately what the business sector is, and so do the search engines.

2. Title Meta Tag

This is the site information that is displayed in the visitor’s brower. In Internet Explorer it looks like:

Place the keywords for your page here, before the name of the site. Either, the visitor already knows the name of the site or has arrived here by searching on keywords and will want to see these reflected on the page on which he has found himself. And search engines like them. Up to 60 chars is all you should use. Only the first 60 chars is displayed in the Google search results titles.

3. Description Meta Tag

The description tag is often what is displayed in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) as a result. This is the result for a search on the term ‘data historian‘:

The first line shows what’s in the Title tag, the lines after usually display the contents of the Description Tag.  Note, that Google is only showing the first 60 chars (including spaces) of the title tag, so even though the term ‘data historian’ is in the website’s title tag, it is not displayed! Keep your Description tag less than 250 chars and reflect your title tag keywords here.

4. Header (h1.. h6) Tags

Special emphasis is placed on words in paragraph headings and also in the content of bullet points and numbered lists. So, pay special attention and use these if appropriate to the sense of your content.

5. Content

Content is King

Your content should reflect the keywords in your Meta Tags.

6. Anchor Text of Inbound Links

Inbound links are invaluable in achieving SEO, but the nature of the links is important too. Also important is the ‘anchor text’, this is the text that is used to actually link to the site. For example:

… the payment gateway www.worldnettps.com provides great service…

is not as valuable as:

…the payment gateway Worldnettps provides great service…

where the link is on the keyword ‘payment gateway’.

7. Blog Post Titles

Here’s another opportunity for keyword placement. Search engines love new content and blog posts offer this. Placing keywords in the Post Titles give the search engines extra information to index. The earlier in the title the better. This one for example, ‘Keywords: make the magic happen’!

8. Blog Categories & Tags

Blog Categories exist for the purpose of organising content and Tags exist to allow site search to return relevant posts. A post may belong to more than one Category and may be tagged with different tags. This post will be categorised in ‘SEO‘ and ‘Digital Marketing’ but will be tagged with ‘search engines‘ and ‘keywords‘. 

9. Page URLs

Having your keywords in your page URLs is also useful in reinforcing what your page is about for the search engines. For example, the following URL contains the keyword ‘book‘ and ‘childrens-books’:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/category/2455/Childrens-Books

10. Alt Tags for Images

Images cannot be read by search engines but you can add Alt tags to show them what the images contain. When the mouse hovers over the image, the content of the Alt tag is shown in a little pop-up box. Using Alt tags also has a usability advantage for those who are sight-impaired and have screen content spoken for them.

11. File Names

If you can use a keyword to appropriately describe a file name, then it is useful to do so as it gives the bots a hint as to what it contains.

12. Keywords Tag

Last but not least, the Keywords Tag. This is the place you might think was the most important. And it’s not. Over-used in the past it is now ignored by Google and may not be used by other search engines, although Yahoo claims that they still use them. So put them in.

There you have it. Go forth and optimise!

No related posts.