Adding SEO keywords
Now that you have your 8-12 keywords to be added across two to four pages, what do you do? Figure out where to put them. And when adding keywords, there are two major ways to incorporate them in a way that will benefit your SEO strategy.
- Adding keywords to the content on your site
- Adding keywords in the elements of the site / page structure
As we will cover site / page structure keyword addition later, lets focus on what's left, incorporating keywords in your site's content. This is done simply by writing the keywords into your content. At the base level, this means including keywords:
- In the url. Build keyword directly into the address of the page – www.yoursite.com/keywords as an example.
- In the title. Keywords in titles, particularly if the title is enclosed in title tags, are extremely powerful. Some put title tags amongst the top three SEO techniques. Title tags look as follows: <title> your keyword rich title </title>
- In header tags. You may be wondering what the difference is between these and titles. These are subheaders in the content. Therefore, if you can use subheaders to break up the sections of your content, do so. Headers are enclosed in header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.)
- In the content body itself. Within the content is where you achieve the majority of your repetition. While there are no specific guidelines, the general rule of thumb is that a keywords should be repeated a maximum of 4-5 times per 350 words and keywords in general should represent no more than 5-7% of the total content.
That's it. Fairly simple. The only other thing to keep in mind is that you should not compromise the value or the flow of content so you can fit more keywords in. Write the page or content first with your keywords in mind and then go back and see where you can work them in.
Other uses for adding SEO keywords
While these will be mentioned in more detail in the page / site structure section it is worth a reminder. Including keywords in the following two ways will give you greater keyword density and repetition and therefore more SEO points.
- Adding Keywords to Tags. Tags are ways of assigning descriptive text to non text elements. This includes images (image tags), logos, graphics, pages (via meta tags and meta descriptions) and links. This is mainly accomplished through alt text.
- Adding Keywords to Links. Keywords can be added to links in three ways. Via the url itself, via the anchor text for the link and via the alt text for the link if the link is through an image.
What adding SEO keywords all comes down to...
The bottom line is that you want to incorporate keywords in as many places and in as many ways as possible – within reason. Keyword inclusion and frequency are an important means by which search engines judge what your content is about as well as the importance of that content.
