Whether you have just started planning your website, or whether you are looking to optimise your pre-existing site for Search Engines, one of the most important things you must consider is the keyword or keywords that you need to use.
Keywords are short phrases that are used by Search Engines to determine how relevant a site is for a search made by a user. Thus, if a user looks for ‘content writing company’, Google will look through all the sites and give the result based on how relevant the content of each site is for the search.
Thus, keywords affect how the search engine treats your site. This makes the selection of keywords very important. However, selection is just the first step of the process. How the keyword is used also affects search results. Here are some suggestions on using keywords effectively.
- The Relevant Keywords: The First step is obviously searching for the right keywords. Your keywords should reflect the products your site sells, which may include a service, an idea, or a concept, in addition to tangible items. Thus, when people are looking for something that you intend to sell through your site, they are able to find their way to it.
Do not try to use keywords that are not relevant simply because they are more popular, because ultimately, every search engine checks the relevance of the keyword against the content of the site. If the search engine finds no relation between the keyword and the content, it will not put up the site very high in its search results.
- The Most Competitive Keywords: There are very few websites, or businesses, that can claim to be unique in their field. Almost every type of website would have some amount of competition and when selecting keywords, one needs to identify the most competitive keywords in order to be effective.
Most people do not realise that it is possible to isolate keywords that are searched a lot, but not optimised a lot by other sites. If you do your research properly, you can identify them, and use them on your site. This places you in the enviable position of having your site one of the few sites that has been optimised to that keyword, and thus figuring higher when someone searches for that particular keyword.
- Keywords Placements: After you have selected the keywords, you need to figure out where to use them. If you are building up your website, you can select a different set of keywords for different pages. It is not unusual to find a page optimised for up to 3 to 6 keywords, based on the content of the page.
For each page, select the most important keyword and use that in the page title. If your keyword selection was done properly, and you have selected the relevant keyword to be the main one, your page title will not only sound good but also make sense.
You can use your keywords in the meta-descriptions on your page, and the alt tags for images should also contain them. If you have a blog, then you can include the keywords in the tags. Another important place which most people neglect to ‘keywordise’ is the anchor tags for links!
- The Appropriate Content to hold the Keywords: The selected keywords should also be distributed in the content of the page, but in an intelligent manner. Since the site is for your customers, make sure that the page makes sense to them, instead of trying to cater to search engines while alienating your viewers. If you plan the content of your website well, the keywords will meld seamlessly with the content.
- The Keyword Density: It may seem important to you to put your keywords as many times as you possibly can in each of the website’s pages, but by ‘stuffing’ your site with keywords, you will only make it a stuffy read. On an average, a keyword can be used 3 times in a page without seeming ‘forced’. If you use it more than that, the web page content might not flow properly.
In order to get web content that is high quality and makes a good read, you can hire a good web content writing company, and most of the times, they will be happy to do the SEO for the site as well.
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