You’ve spent a considerable amount of time choosing the right keywords for each important page of your site. You’ve gone to a search engine and searched for those keywords to see how much competition you have, and you’ve taken it one crucial step further by visiting WordTracker to see what people are really searching for.
But where on earth do you put your keywords? Can’t you just slap up a few META tags containing your keywords and be done with it?
Not hardly!
Before we look at exact spots where you can place your keywords, let’s spend a few minutes learning how the engines determine the relevancy of a web page.
When an engine visits your site, it sees your HTML, or source code. The engines consider anything that’s toward the top of the page to be more relevant than anything further down on the page. Therefore, the <head> section of your web page, which is at the very top of the page, is extremely important in terms of relevancy, as well as the fact that the <title> tag and META description tag are used in the search results for most engines.
So, be sure to place your keywords toward the top of the page, in the beginning of your keyword-containing tags, and in the beginning of your body text.
Many other factors come into play when determining relevancy, including the keyword weight of the page, how popular the website is in terms of link popularity, how frequently the keywords are used, how close to the root domain the page is, and so forth. However, for this article, we’re concentrating on where we can place our all-important keywords.
Options of Where You Can Include Keywords
Note: This article has been cut down for brevity's sake. For the full context of the article, along with many more ideas of places where you include your keywords, click here.
Keywords in the <TITLE> tag
Keywords in the <meta name="description"> tag
Keywords in the <meta name="keyword"> tag
Keywords in the heading tags (h2, h3, etc.) tag
Keywords in the link text
Keywords in the body text
Keywords in the ALT tags
And so forth.
In Closing . . .
Keep in the mind that the search engines are part of a dynamic industry that changes all the time. Be prepared to try new things to see how they work, based on your particular keyword phrase, which engine you’re using, and that engine’s preferences at that time. However, don’t ever spam the engines. Play it safe and above board, and your website will benefit from your honesty in the long run.
This article was written by Robin Nobles, Director of Training at the Academy of Web SpecialistsTM. Over the past few years, she has trained over 100 people in her online and onsite courses in search engine positioning strategies. Visit this website to learn more: http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.
