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.

Top Paying Adsense SEO Keywords

What I have for you today is a list of the top paying keywords for Google Adsense that you can make with seo,web dev related websites. These are for Google Adsense of course.

If you do not have an account simply shoot on over to Google.com and sign up for Google Adsense.

Download Keyword List