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After You've Chosen Your Keywords,
Where On Earth Do You Put Them?
by Robin Nobles
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 a search engine visits your site, it’s looking at the "skeleton view" of the page, not the fancy and well-designed website that viewers see. Instead, the engines see the source code, or HTML, of a page.
To give you an idea of what the engines see,your browser and go to any web page. If you’re using Netscape, click on View, then Page Source. If you’re using Internet Explorer, click on View, then Source.
You’re now viewing the skeleton of the page, which we’ll call the source code.
When an engine visits your site, it sees this 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.
Before we get started on some ideas of where you can include your keywords, here are a couple of points to keep in mind:
- Every engine has a different ranking algorithm, which simply means that they each consider different things important or not important when determining relevancy and ranking. Therefore, what works for one engine won’t necessarily work for another.
- The engines like simplicity! You’ll have much more success with your web page if you’re not utilizing techniques like frames, JavaScript, dynamic pages, graphic-intense pages, etc.
- Because the engines like simplicity, don’t approach search engine positioning like the proverbial "bull in a china closet." Instead, take it slowly. Don’t utilize every one of these techniques on your page. Instead, start with a few, remembering that the tags toward the top of the page are most important. If you need boosts in relevancy, then add a few more tags to see how that helps.
- In most cases, you won’t be able to optimize each page for more than one or two keywords. So, don’t think that you’ll be able to optimize your main page for 14 different keyword phrases. It just won’t work! Finetune each page for one or two keyword phrases only, and you’ll be much more successful.
- The options below are a general listing of where you can place keywords, but again, it depends on the individual search engine whether the techniques will work or not. Also, things change so fast in this industry, which means that what works today may not work tomorrow.
Options of Where You Can Include Keywords
Keywords in the <TITLE> tag
Example:
<TITLE>Educational children’s software</TITLE>
Keywords in the <meta name="description"> tag
Example:
<meta name="description" content="Educational children’s software makes learning just plain fun!">
Note: All META tags should go in the <head> </head> section of your page.
Keywords in the <meta name="keyword"> tag
Example:
<meta name="keywords" content="educational children’s software, educational software, childrens software, EDUCATIONAL CHILDREN’S SOFTWARE">
Remember that sticking in a bunch of keywords in the keyword META tag won’t get your page ranked high for all of those keywords. In order to get a top ranking with a keyword phrase, you have to use that phrase throughout your page, in your title tag, and in other tags as well. The importance of the META keyword tag has diminished greatly in the last several months.
Keywords in the <meta http-equiv="keywords"> tag
Example:
<meta http-equiv="keywords" name="keywords" CONTENT="educational childrens software">
A few of the engines, including AltaVista, consider the content of http-equiv keyword tags for relevancy.
Keywords in the heading tags (h2, h3, etc.) tag
Example:
<h3 ALIGN="CENTER">Educational Children’s Software is Fun!</h3>
Many of the engines place considerable relevancy on heading tags, so use them frequently, especially toward the top of your page. You may also want to try putting your entire body text in a small heading tag.
Keywords in the link text
Example:
<A HREF=http://yourwebsite.com/keyword-phrase.htm></A>Click here for more educational children’s software programs.
Note: When you put your keyword phrases in your URLs, be sure to separate those phrases with a "-" or a "_" instead of running the keywords together. By breaking the words up in some way, the engines will see them as individual words in a phrase. If the words are not broken up, the spiders will see the words as a single term.
Example:
http://www.yourwebsite.com/web-optimizing-techniques.htm (which you should do)
vs.
http://www.yourwebsite.com/weboptimizingtechniques.htm (which you should not do)
Keywords in the body text
Remember the importance of placing your keyword phrase early in the body text of the page.
Also, since some search engines retrieve the first few lines of your webpage and utilize them as the description of your site in the search results, be sure to put a number of important keywords in the first few lines of your introductory text. Try to craft the beginning text so that it is appropriate to be used as a description of your site.
Make the first 25 words in the body of your page keyword rich. Begin your page with text, not an image. The engines can’t "read" images, though many of the engines can read ALT tags of those images.
Spread your keyword phrases throughout the body of the page in natural sounding paragraphs. Put a keyword at the end of your body text as well.
Added tip!
Try putting your keyword phrases in bold in your body text. Sometimes this boosts relevancy.
Keywords in the ALT tags
Example:
<IMG SRC="images/box.gif" ALT="educational children’s software" WIDTH="415" HEIGHT="100">
The purpose of an ALT tag is to describe the contents of a picture that hasn't loaded yet for the benefit of web surfers who surf with the images turned off. Many surfers with older computers/browsers search with the images turned off.
However, if you’ll insert your keyword phrase in your ALT tag rather than describing the graphic, or do both, you’ll have a boost in relevancy with many of the engines.
Another idea that works quite well, especially with AltaVista, is to create a bulleted list on your page. Use tiny bullet graphics with ALT tags, and insert your keyword phrase in each of those ALT tags.
To download a tiny bullet graphic, visit this website:
http://www.onlinewebtraining.com/images/circle1.gif
Click on File, then Save As.
Use single pixel images with ALT tags
If your page doesn’t contain graphics, or if you’d like an extra boost in relevancy, consider using clear single pixel images.
Download this small clear gif from this website:
http://www.onlinewebtraining.com/images/clr.gif
When you go to the above page, it will be totally blank. That’s because the graphic is CLEAR!
To download the gif, click on File on the top toolbar, then choose Save As (since you can’t see it on the page).
Then, insert that tiny, transparent graphic preferably near the top of the web page for the best effect:
<IMG SRC="clr.gif" BORDER="0" ALT="educational children’s software">
Notice that the height and width tags are left off. Without those tags, the engine can’t easily determine the size of the graphic, so nothing about this strategy will send up a "red flag."
You can use the single pixel gif option even if you utilize other graphics on your page.
Keywords in comment tags
Example:
<!—-educational children’s software>
The only major engines that consider the comment tags for relevancy at this time are HotBot and the Inktomi engines.
Keywords contained in the URL or site address
Example:
http://www.yoursite.com/educational_childrens_software.htm
In this example, you name your HTML page after your keyword phrase.
Keywords contained in the names of images
Example:
"childrens-educational-software.gif"
Sometimes renaming your images after your keywords can give you a boost in relevancy.
Keywords in the domain name
Example:
EducationalChildrensSoftware.com
Or
Educational-Childrens-Software.com
If you’re in the market for additional domains, be sure to purchase domain names that have your keywords in them. You’ll get a boost in relevancy, plus an index page for each domain. Most of the engines give a boost in relevancy to an index page of a domain.
You could have one main domain, and the other domains could serve as "doorway domains" by linking to the main one. Don’t utilize a technique known as "pointing," because you want to be able to get each of those domains indexed separately. Optimize the index page of each domain for one of your important keyword phrases.
Keywords in a <noframes> tag, even though you’re not using frames
Example:
<noframes>
<body>
<add META tags here>
<h2> <Educational Children’s Software offers Learning under the Guise of Fun!> </h2>
<p> <Can’t get your child to play educational games on your computer? No problem! Our educational children’s software is designed to be just plain fun, so that your kids don’t even
realize they’re learning.></p>
<p><Purchase educational children’s software in subjects such as foreign languages, math, and English.></p>
<a href="educational-childrens-software.htm"></a>
<a href="sitemap.htm"></a>
</body>
</noframes>
You can use the <noframes> tag on a non-framed page to place text, and the engine will "find" and index it. It will index the page plus any content within the <noframes> tag. You can place links to other pages of your site, text, tags, etc. Text within this area does count toward your total keyword weight.
Keywords in a <style> tag
Example:
<style>educational children’s software</style>
A few of the engines will index the content of <style> tags and consider the content for relevancy. AltaVista is one of those engines, as well as Excite/WebCrawler.
Keywords in the font tag
Example:
<FONT COLOR="educational children’s software"></FONT>
Keywords in background images
Example:
<body background=/spacer.gif text="#222222" ALT="Put keyword phrase here" bgcolor="white" link="#0033ff" vlink="#555555" alink="red">
Keywords in META Author Tag
Example:
<META name="author" content="insert keyword phrase here">
This works with HotBot at the present time.
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 1000 people in her online and onsite courses in search engine positioning strategies and has written three books that can be ordered through Amazon. Visit the Academy's training Website to learn more about their online courses: http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.
For more search engine articles, click here.
Academy of Web SpecialistsTM
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