Keyword optimisation is one way to improve your search engine ranking and you don’t need to be an expert to make some simple improvements on your use of keywords.
You need to strike a balance between finding keyword search phrases that don’t have a lot of competition but which do get regular searches. Too much competition for a search phrase means a long list of search returns and if the search phrase isn’t used frequently it means fewer potential searches.
Your keyword research will only get you just so far – sites which appear at the top of search engine listings now depend to some extent on the quality of their content. Search engines now are even sensitive to grammar and spelling which further emphasises the focus on quality content.
Page Title
Once you have chosen your keywords, the next step to optimise your pages is to build your keywords into the page title. Limit your inclusion to one keyword or search phrase per page title, more than this and it will appear false to both search engines and your readers.
The title of your page is what search engines will display, so a page title rammed with keywords will be confusing to the search engines and readers alike. Stick with one keyword or search phrase and incorporate that within the page title.
URL
Another place for your keywords to appear is in the URL of your page. Standard practice is for keywords to be separated by hyphens (-) in the keyword phrase – a practice which reinforces the page title for search engines and readers alike. If you want to make the URL shorter than the actual title just remember to include the keyword phrase in the shortened version.
Headings
Another place to look to include keywords is within the headings throughout the structure of your page. Headings are an important tool within the formatting of your content to guide your readers through the content and to help them understand what your pages are about.
Headings work in the same way for search engines by letting them know what topics are discussed on the page, making them an important optimisation tool. Keywords within the headings are heavily weighted. However, don’t be tempted to overdo it; make sure your use of keywords within the headings doesn’t negatively affect the quality of your content.
Body Content
Having keywords appear through out your page content should occur automatically, as you would expect the content and keywords to be related. Again, keywords shouldn’t detract from the readability of your content. Don’t forget the emphasis has shifted to the quality of your content – and both search engines and your readers will appreciate it.
Doing all of the other things well and then failing to provide quality content will still hurt your efforts to optimise your pages. Avoid spelling mistakes and sloppy grammar – and make sure your content is useful and of value to the reader – let keywords occur naturally.
Links
Take advantage of opportunities to link to articles of related content within your website. Don’t be tempted to link to numerous pages of unrelated content – you need to ensure that the reader would find the content at the other end of the link useful.
Use anchor text which makes sense to readers when you are constructing out-links. You need to be sure that the anchor text is relevant to the landing page and makes sense in context to where it appears on the page. If links don’t work well within the main body of the page text you can always include a section at the end which links to related articles
Other things to look at
Other places that readers and search engines may focus is the content within the ‘strong’ and ‘em’ tags and images. These tags make the content much more likely to stand out to the reader and so search engines may weight this content accordingly.
Images are also a great place to include keywords because search engines, though not able to read text within a graphic, do scan the text associated with the image. The name of the image URL, the alternate text and the description are all places to include relevant keywords.
Quality reigns supreme
At the end of the day, the people who visit your site are most likely to become your next customer and not the search engines. Your text needs to written in such a way that it is interesting and well written and inspires people to return or purchase there and then. To do that, your content has to be optimised for them – if it can be optimised for the search engines as well, so much the better.
Contact us if you need help optimising your own website content.
