Ok. I'Ve Got My Keywords. Now What?

Okay, so you have found your keywords. Now what?

Well, you need to know where to put them!

Here is a list of the best places to use your keywords on your web pages to give you that much need SEO boost.

Title tag
This is an extremely important tag and it certainly should include your keywords. I've lost count of how many home pages I have seen with the Title of "home page".

The title is also what appears when your page is listed by the search engines and so it needs to be compelling to the human eye as well as include your keywords for the search engines.

Ideally the title should be no more than 100 characters including spaces. Google displays unto 66 characters, Yahoo much more.

Also, get your main keyword in early in the title text. For example, on a web page aimed at offering web optimising advice to small businesses and the keyword for the page is "web optimising" I might use the following Title:

Web Optimising for Small Businesses

Alternatively if my keyword for the page is "small businesses" I might switch the Title to be:

Small Business Web Optimising

Description Tag

Some search engines check the description tag to get a good understanding of what the web page is about. So you must include your keywords in this tag. It's important to remember that your description tag is frequently the test displayed when your web page is listed by the search engines. So again it needs to be compelling for your potential visitors.

Headings

The heading tags (ie: h1, h2, etc) are considered of importance by the search engines and therefore you should include your keywords in these headings whenever you can. You should certainly make sure the main heading of the page (ie: the H1 tag) contains your keyword.

Content

The main copy of your web page should also use your keywords. However it is important to remember that the copy is there to convert your customer to do something once they have arrived at the web page. If the copy does not guide them to taking the action you want them to take then getting your customer to the page has all been for nothing. So, write the page with the purpose in mind and try to work the keywords in naturally into the content.

Incidentally some pundits state that you should include your keywords near the top of the page as this effects the rating the search engines apply to your page. I’m not sure if that is true, however if I were a visitor to your site that found you through keywords on a search engine I would find it welcoming to find those keywords early in my reading of your page.

Links

Use your keywords in any links to your page from within your own web site and ideally where you can on links from external web sites. Search engines following these links will pick up on these keywords as being relevant to your page.

Alt tag

On all your images, use the alt tag and include your keywords in the text. Obviously the text needs to be relevant to the image. Using the alt tag is important for addressing web site accessibility which is now a legal requirement in many countries. Also, search engines read this text and use it for indexing your site.

Follow the guidelines in this article on how to use keywords to optimise your web site and I’m sure you will soon see increased traffic to your site.




Mike Seddon is the founder of KKSmarts. Their site contains many free guides that will show you how to drive traffic to your website. Their Free Google SEO Training is also very popular and can be enjoyed online in the comfort of your own home.

5 Quality Check Tips from a Professional SEO Company

Ever wondered what a professional SEO Company looks for when beginning a new project on a clients site.

There are a number of high-end quality Search Engine Optimising (SEO) and Marketing firms out there today. Ever wondered what is really involved when a website is put through its SEO maintenance check list. The following is an example of work that is normally carried out by professional SEO Company 360innovate.

ANALYSIS

Firstly, when a customer approaches 360 with a view to having SEO work carried out on their site the initial stage is to analyse the site and see what keywords they already target (if any) and also what on-site work needs to be done on the website (we call this on-page optimisation). It’s a bit like having a health and safety assessment on your premises, we go through the nuts and bolts of your site, the text, images, layout, navigation, structure and usability features to make sure that its been built to a standard that enables your site to rank at its most optimum in the main search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask).

There are at least 200 individual areas we examine and check and it is a very important first stage that gets you started. Thankfully there are a lot of customers out there who have employed good designers who make sure that the initial work is done and that the first stages as described above can be kept to a minimum.

KEYWORD RESEARCH

Keyword research is a very important step used in identifying what people actually type in the search engines to find your product or services.

For example, most of our customers find us using "SEO Company", or "SEO Company UK", but we also get traffic from "Search Engine Optimisation Company Scotland" or "Internet Marketing Company" plus a whole range of other sources.
Another factor to take into consideration is the conversion rate from a particular keyword search. Conversion rates can be determined by how many times it takes a unique visit to your site to actually buy something or even make an enquiry. There may be multiple reasons why your site is not converting from not targeting the correct traffic, bad design or navigation, perhaps your site suffers from a number of negatives that simply put people off from ordering/enquiring due to the lack of trust.

THE COMPETITION

We look at their site, not just once, but every day, we monitor changes, we log them, we work out why they are achieving such good results and we implement a strategy to better them.

KEYWORD DEFINITION

After extensive research into the keywords and phrases used in your industry we agree with you the amount of keywords that you wish us to focus on.This will vary from customer to customer, some customers will only want us to focus on a small amount of keywords for their SEO campaign and some will want us to focus on thousands of keywords, this is also how we define how much time we spend on your site initially and on a ongoing basis and according how much it will cost.

ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS/PRESS RELEASES

We produce articles and on-line press releases related to your business on a monthly basis linked to the keywords we use in your campaign, with links to your site within the content. We then release/publish these documents within trusted on-line sites that the search engines like to visit and read on a regular basis, this in turn links back to your site and gives you favourable search engine listing results, as the search engines see you updating your content on a regular basis.

LINK BUILDING

We will seek to link your site to as many other trusted sites available that are in your industry, for example if you are a retailer, we would link your site to National Retail Federation, or if you were a restaurant, we would link your site to a trusted restaurant review site. Link Building is a fundamental part of any SEO package. Search engines monitor the links pointing to your site. Gathering trusted links to your domain is a natural progression and any website that suddenly accumulates hundreds or thousands of links in a very short time frame will be flagged for underhand tactics and possibly put under review with a ban from the search engines being the favoured outcome. Not a good business strategy.

TIME SCALES

The time taken achieve good page one results differs according to how competitive your industry is, and anyone or company that guarantees you top ten results within a short time-frame be extremely cautious about employing them to carry out SEO work for you. However, If you have an uncompetitive keyword or phrase, then you can normally see results in about 6-12 weeks, if on the other hand you are in a fiercely competitive industry then it can be anywhere between 4-12 months.

ONGOING WORK

Everything spoken about here is not something that we do on one occasion, but is completely and utterly ongoing. It’s best to see SEO or Internet Marketing as a pro-active approach. The guidelines are always changing. What may work well today may not tomorrow. There are other approaches that we have not even touched upon in this article such as viral marketing, blogging, email marketing, podcasts, video marketing and social media marketing. The web is a fluid market, if you stand still then your competitors will pass you by.

Article By Paul Steven.

The 5 Best SEO Tips You Will Ever Read

Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to be an SEO "guru" to rank well in the Search Engines. There are only a handful of things you need to do in order to rank well. Those who concentrate on what’s important will quickly pass those who spend their time worrying about all of the little things that may or may not increase their rankings!

Below you will find the 5 most important SEO factors:

1: Links - The quantity and quality of the links on the WWW which point to your site and it's subpages is the #1 off-page SEO factor! When it comes to top Search Engine rankings the most influential factor really is the incoming links! Submit articles and do selective link exchanges to give your site a push-start and let your good content (below) bring it to the top!

2: Title and META Tags - The title and META description of each individual page is the most important on-page SEO factor! Craft your title and description in a way that is both Search Engine friendly (contains your primary keyword) and user friendly (convinces them to click.) Remember, if it is full of keywords and not user friendly, your rankings will not matter, as no one will click. If it is user friendly, but doesn't contain your main keyword, you will not rank as high as you would if it had your keyword (in most cases.)

3: Internal Linking - A good internal linking structure will not only show the SE's which of your pages are more important, it can actually increase the rankings of those pages! Use the rel="nofollow" attribute on links that don't need any "link juice" like your contact pages, about pages, affiliate links and duplicated pages.

4: Quality Content - Quality content will bring in "natural" links. If you're spitting out low-quality, rehashed content, you won't impress anyone. If you do not impress anyone your job will be much harder, as you'll have to manually build all of your links.

5: Keyword Density doesn't Matter - "Keyword Density" is no longer important. With the implementation of "Latent Semantic Indexing" (LSI) most major Search Engines do not rank a page higher because it contains a keyword a set number of times. Just write natural content and good things will come!

So to recap, build solid incoming links, compose a good title and META description, create a solid internal linking structure, write quality content and don't worry about keyword density!

This is the strategy that has worked for me in order to obtain front-page ranking for many competitive terms and I'm confident it will for you as well!




To see how I've conquered some of the most competitive keywords on the Internet, visit http://www.TheEasySEOReport.com/ where I provide my extremely popular SEO Report for absolutely Free!