How To Use Keywords

If you have read our previous lesson “What Are Keywords?” let’s move on to how to use them. As we explained in the prior lesson, keywords are what make or break your website when ranking within search engines.

Here are the steps we are going to explain with using them:

• Meta Tags
• Navigation Menu’s
• Text Formatting
• Anchor Text / Back Links

Meta-Tags

Please read our other lessons on meta-tags and how to use them for a more in depth explanation on what they are and how to use them.

Meta-Title, Meta-Keywords, Meta-Description

Meta tags are the information in your header that tells the search engines what your website and certain pages are. In your tags you have the Title, Description, Keywords. The title is well, what it says. It is your page title. In your title you want to use keywords within your description. Please refrain from using your website name or your website address in the title unless your website name has the keywords in it that you are trying to rank for. In the title use a brief description of what your page is about while using a keyword or two within it.

Your meta-keywords are the keywords that your site is relevant to and what you are trying to rank for. Use no more than 30.

The meta description is what the description of your page is and this comes up in search engines under the page title/url/link to your site. Again use a brief description using no more than 140-160 characters in it with keywords that you are trying to rank for in it also.

Navigation Menu’s

For a more in depth explanation on how to optimize your navigation menu’s please visit our lesson for Focusing On Navigation Menu’s.

To give a brief explanation, you want to use keywords in place of your categories in your navigation menu’s. This helps you rank for the given keywords and it tells the search engines what each page/category is about and pretty much helps map your website out for the search engines.

Text Formatting

When writing your articles in the body of your page, you want to build it around keywords that you are ranking for. In the title of your article you want to use <h1>, <h2> tags which are basic HTML header tags for a paragraph. These tags weigh a lot within search engines.

When using keywords within your articles you want to bold and italicize them which also makes them stick out within search engines and also makes them weigh a lot. Don’t over due it with the bolding and italicizing of keywords for your page will look spammy and non-user friendly. Try to use each keyword 5-7 times in an article and don’t use anymore than 2-3 keyword phrases in each article.

Anchor Text / Back Links

As explained in our previous lesson, anchor text is one of the main factors in your website ranking. The anchors help tell the search engines that this is a keyword phrase that your site is about hence when someone goes to search for example “SEO Tips” your site will come up. Whether it is first page or 20-30 pages back, it will come up. To help rank higher you want to use anchors in your back links. A back link is simply a link from another site to yours. As explained in the previous lesson, a back link is basically counted as a “Vote” for your website.

Always link with quality sites preferably with a high page rank. You can use the Google Page Rank Check Tool to determine what other websites rank. The ranking chart goes from 1-10, 10 being the highest.

For more information please visit our lesson on Anchor Text.

What are keywords?

Let’s get started with this chapter of are lesson discussing keywords, what they are, how and where to use them, and which ones to choose.

If you are new to SEO you may wonder what keywords are in the Search Engine Optimization world and how to find and use them.

Keywords are what make up your site, your niche/category and they tell a search engine what your site is about and help you place / rank within search engines. Keywords are the search terms that people are searching for in which you want to come up on the first page of the search engine when searched for.

When deciding what keywords you want to try and rank for with your website there are a few factors that come into play. Which ones are related? Which are most searched for, and which are most and least competitive. When you first get a website going, you don’t want to focus on keywords that have a lot of competition for it will take a while for you to rank for them. You have to build your website up day by day. So, try to rank for less competitive keywords in which you can easily move up and beat the competition for that will bring your website traffic/hits and increase your website popularity.

Don’t totally cut out the competitive keywords though also, as your site grows in ranking and popularity, you will move up within the search engine. So mainly focus on the less competitive keywords but use and optimize for a few of the more competitive ones also so when the day comes that you see you are starting to achieve popularity and say over websites, you will already be somewhat ranking for those competitive keywords and you will move up and rank easier and faster for them.

Now, you want to use a couple tools here to determine which keywords that you want to start optimizing for. First you want to use the Google Keyword Tool. This will show you how many searches a keyword gets monthly, how competitive it is and you can also look at your competitions keywords and even use them. This helps and cuts off a lot of time. Also you can use the keywordspy tool for free to spy on your competitors which comes in handy when monetizing your website for making money with Google adsense. This will show you what keywords your competitors are making money off of with adsense. Saves you a heap of work. We would design a similar Google keyword tool but you can’t beat the leading search engines tools.

Google Keyword Tool

Keyword Spy Tool

Meta Description

Use of the Meta Description tag in your page headers is a very important role in ranking. The descriptions are what show up in search engines which give you a short brief 2 sentence description under your site title/url.

A good trick when optimizing your description is to use a couple keywords that you are trying to rank for. If you will look below you will see that google scopes through these descriptions as well as titles and brings them up in bold within the search. See below.

Now another trick to increase hits is to make your description catchy. Don’t just stuff it with a bunch of keywords and nonsense for it will look spammy or just not to relevant to what the user is searching for. Spice it up a bit while using your keywords within it and you will beat all other competition.

Now another factor that plays in this, as discuss in the page meta titles and body titles lesson is that in some cases, the first couple of lines in your body will show up in place for the page description. So when starting your article body off, spice it up and use keywords with in it. The search engine will list about 2 lines or 140-160 characters. use it to your benefit.

Meta-Keywords

Using meta keywords is not as effective as it used to be, if at all. It still does not hurt to edit this and put keywords in there because regardless of what some SEO’s think, using the meta keywords tag does help you a little.

Let’s go back in time a bit shall we? Optimizing your meta keywords tag used to play a huge role in ranking within search engines. People started using this to their advantage and manipulating the search engine crawlers so that they could get top rankings for certain keywords. They did this by stuff their meta tag with keywords and tons of duplicates. From this being abuse since then, Google has changed their algorithm when it comes to this and now it is no longer as effective. If you get caught stuffing keywords, your site will be penalized or banned.

Now when using your meta keywords, the limit of keywords that you should is in it is 30 words(each key phrase before the comma is considered a word(s) ).

If you have any more question related to meta tags please comment below, discuss in the forum or one of the team can help you personally 1 on 1.

Creating Unique Content

A lot of people out there are always asking and looking for article rewriting scripts and programs. I do not condone to this type of thing but, we do have an article rewriter on here for download.

Having unique content is something that search engines like. If you are just writing about something that a couple million other websites already covered, it is just old news. If you have something new and fresh, search engines and visitors alike will eat it up like a fat kid bum rushing the cake on his birthday. Hehe.

Also never, NEVER, plaigiarize content and steal from other people. You will get penalized or even banned from search engines for this. In some cases you could even have a lawsuit filed against you! Would it really be so hard to spend 10 minutes on an article? People come to your website for YOUR opinion and what YOU have to offer. So keep it real, don’t steal.

If you don’t think someone wont find you, wrong! That is what copyscape is for.

Sometimes, or in most cases, webmasters and authors are afraid to speak their mind and their opinions because of the bad feedback they think they might get. Even if you do get bad feedback, it is still good feedback. It is your website and you are speaking your opinion so let it be heard. There are always going to be critics whether you like it or not, learn to embrace it.

Meta Title, Page Body Titles

You want to focus on your page titles, this can make you or break you in most cases. In your page titles you want to use the keywords you are trying to rank for but at the same time make the title look appealing to visitors. If you are ranking first page in a search engine, you want to grab their attention.

Using a keyword phrase in each page title will help with the keyword you are trying to rank for , for that page. So let’s say you have a page with an article on SEO Tips for learning how to use anchor text. You could simply make your page title something similar to this:

SEO Tips – How to use Anchor Text

Now you are bettering your rank for seo tips and anchor text. If I were searching on how to use anchor text, I would click on this and feel like I know for sure that I am going to get the information that I am looking for.

Now in the body title of your page article, I would prefer to use an <h1> tag which is a basic HTML heading tag. Reason being is that these tags weigh the most in the body of a page when trying to rank.

So you would of course include a keyword or 2 in that with your short description/article title. This will help bring up the keyword when someone is searching for it along with the first 2 lines of your body in the page description in search engines. Also you want to optimize your meta description tag with something similar depending on which the search engine will bring up. Which ever is more relevant to the search.

Amount of text on a page seo

The amount of text on your page is a large factor in ranking within search engines. If you have a page that is just consisting of a couple sentences, it will not be enough content to properly describe your page. As we have noted in other articles, using keywords in your articles play a large role. Now with only a few sentences, you will not be able to accomplish much.

Search engines favor sites that have high content. Please remember that your content needs to be unique. If you have a well written article that isn’t around, google will favor it as oppossed to just giving the same information that a million other websites have.

The optimum page size is 500 – 3000 words. If you were counting by characters this would be within the range of 2,000 to 20,000 characters. Your visibility within the search engines is maximized by how much content you have. The search engine might bring up pieces of information in your article on accident which can bring you a lot of traffic with a larger article.

Make your page friendly to search engines and to readers.

Keyword phrase for one page

Your best bet when optimizing a page is to optimize for one keyword. Focus it on this. You can usually choose two or three phrase which are related to your main phrase. Even try to use maybe a mispelling which are common typo mistakes people make. Again, as explain in previous articles, you can use a keyword tool such as google keyword tool.

When optimizing for 5-10 or more phrases at once this will probably produce little or no effect on page rank. Also focusing on certain keywords plays a role in monetizing your page for google adsense ads.

So remember, focus on between 1 through 3 keyword phrases for the best results in page rankings.

Main Page Of Your Website – SEO

Optimize the main page of your site (domain name, index.html) for word combination’s that are most important. This page is most likely to get to the top of search engine lists. My seo observations suggest that the main page may account for up to 30-40% percent of the total search traffic for some sites.

When registering a domain name, try to use keywords with in it that you are ranking for. If you can get a genuine domain name that hasn’t been taken, jump on it! Also for the main page of your website, try to use different combination’s of keywords that will bring you traffic and bump you up in rankings. Always keep your eyes peeled on your stats, rankings. You can use a keyword tool to see what keywords are most competitive and which aren’t, which different combination’s are being used and the whole 9 yards.

For example if you have a wallpapers website, using a domain name with the keyword wallpapers in it can play a huge part in ranking for that keyword. Unfortunately it would be almost impossible to get a domain name like www.wallpapers.com or www.freewallpapers.com . You could always try to put in a back order so that once the domain expires you could try to snatch it.

You see that the keywords are in Bold text. Also if you view our article on using meta tags , descriptions and optimizing the first sentence or 2 of your website you will learn how to optimize better for ranking in search engines. Always remember that you want to use keywords while making your description and title look appealing. Give the visitor a reason to click your site or in other words try to give them the thought of if they click it, they know that they will find what they are looking for!

Now doing this plays a big role with your main page. For most cases, your main page will show your meta description, for other pages, it will usually show the first sentence or so in the description. Now you see above it is showing the meta description and title for the main pages. If you have other pages that are ranking, here is an example of the search engine crawling the first sentence and listing it within the rankings.

As you can see, page isn’t optimized well for the search engine. It is up to you what you can do with it.

Avoiding subdirectories

If you website is not that big, you want to avoid using sub directories. A sub directory is a directory/folder within the root, or folder of your website.

Search engines consider pages within the root directory of your website to be more important than ones in sub directories. So, if you have a larger website, simply make sure your main pages are within the root folder of your website. When using sub directories for other pages, simply use a format for your directory/folder names like so:

Instead of let’s say, using a folder named root/tips/ , root/seotips/

Simply put a – in between words. Use the main keywords that your are trying to rank for for these folder names also, don’t just use general keywords. So here is an example:

root/seo-tips/

Why use a “-” ?

We want to use a “-” because search engines consider these spaces. Let’s say you have three words within your keyword you are trying to rank for. Simply just put 2 dashes in between to space them out.

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