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

Using text over images with seo

One common error people make when designing a website is embedding text into images. This is done through any photo editing program. A lot of web designers focus too much on images, image links, and embedded text into images to spice up their website. This is the same concept as our other article “Focusing On Navigation Menu’s” .

Search engines cannot and I repeat CANNOT read text in images. If you are using an image with text in it to link to another page within your site, simply scratch that image and put a text link in there (anchor text link).

An anchor text link is just a basic URL/Href. Instead of putting a URL in it for the text, you put a keyword of whatever you may be linking to. Visit our other article on Anchor Text for more information on what they are and how to use them properly.

Search engines determine what your website is about by reading the text on every page. Using <h1> , <h2>, <h3> tags really helps with optimization. These tags weigh more than regular text. Bolding and italicizing text also weighs out.

What weight means is, when a search engine crawls/reads your page, use of these tags makes these words stick out, <h1> being the most. Use these for category names and article headings. When using any of the others, you don’t want to over due it for it will make the users experience miserable, for example bolding way too many words. Bold keywords that you want to rank for.

So the conclusion of this is, keep image use at a minimum when linking or using category names/keyword names. Using CSS can spice everything up AND use all of the text you need.

Things never to do with SEO

Today we are going to discuss some things you should avoid when optimizing your blog/website for search engines. Shall we begin?

SEO Spam and and paying to submit to directories.

Have you ever seen ads around the internet stating that they will submit your website to hundreds or thousands of search engines? How about 500 directories? Or maybe buying thousands of backlinks for a small price? Never give in to this, you just can’t buy this kind of work for $25.00 . Your site will be submitted to link farms of a directory. No SEO can gaurantee a number one ranking and for a small price your site won’t be submitted to all those directories and search engines. No true SEO is a spammer.

Have you ever put your content across several domains?

This is not something good to do unless you have a bulk user base and for certain content considerations. This will get a bunch of your sites in the SERPS so look up more about sub-domains and domains with search engine optimization. Submitting to search engines can’t hurt but really, only submit to a couple of the top ones. Usually you won’t have to do this because the search engines will automatically crawl your website when you are linked with a site that is being crawled.

Make your pages crawlable!

Now you never want to make your site to where a crawler can’t access it or crawl all of your pages you want. This happens when you don’t write your robots.txt file correctly. Also having sessions Id’s or too many variables in your urls can effect this. Always use words and keywords of your categories and topics in your urls. When you have a navigation menu you, never use all all images or flash. The crawlers cannot read these things. Unless you have a portfolio or something related, never use an all image or flash website period. Crawlers read the text in your site, the aren’t human and cannot read the text or images in flash.

For more information on optimizing your navigation menu’s and a better explanation on using text instead of flash and all images, check out a previous topic I wrote on optimizing your categories .

Targeting general keywords and why not to.

If you are starting a website or blog and if your website isn’t ranked well yet, never try to target general popular keywords that have a lot of competition. Always optimize for relevant specific keywords that will bring traffic that you targeted traffic. For example, you have a video game website and you decide to target the keyword “Gaming”. You will be blown away by competition without a chance, even if ranked decently. Try to rank for something more relevant than just general gaming and start off with some keywords that have lower competition and build your way up as you go up in ranking.

Keyword stuffing and irrelevant keywords.

This is a DON’T and you can get banned from it by Google. Stuffing your meta tags with irrelevant keywords means that these keywords have no relation to your website or topic. Google does not like this even though google does not base rankings off of meta tags anymore because it was too abused in the past it is still good to use them anyways. The max you should use is roughly 600-700 characters in a meta tag. Limit it to no more than about twenty targeted phrase of maybe two words or more. Make sure you separate them with commas of course. If you are using the same keyword avoid using it more than three to seven times. List them in the order of how important they are to your website and what you are trying to rank for. Do not use hidden keywords as text in your pages (people generally do this in the footer). Google considers this spam and will ban you for this. People do this by stuffing them in the footer and making the text the same color as the background color.

Avoid duplicate content.

Try to avoid this and avoid using the same titles in every page. If your page is on a certain topic, use the topics keywords in the title. Do the same with the pages of your categories. Don’t use www.blah.com and blah.com to direct to your homepage. Believe it or not, these both are two seperate addresses and will be considered duplicate content. Don’t link your home page with www.blah.com/index.html from www.blah.com either. Use the one address that you established for your website.

Site layout, structure , usablity.

Make sure that your site is optimized for both your users and search engine spiders. Use proper structure, navigation, descriptive links and text and headers. You want your website to look good and be easy to navigate your your users and visitors but at the same time you want it to where spiders will just eat your site and pages up. I stress again using text over images as much as possible.

Back-linking to relevant sites.

If your website is let’s say once again, about “Gaming” , don’t link to a weight-loss website because you have nothing in common. When building back links, you always want to build links between you and websites that are relevant and similar to what your website is about. This will work out for the both of you and eventually you can get more back links through those people.

Using anchor text and mixing it up.

When using anchor text, don’t use the exact same anchor text for each site that you are building a back link from. Switch it up. This is called unnatural link building. So vary up your keywords in your anchor text on different websites with keywords that are related to your site and related to words you are trying to rank for. If you don’t know what anchor text is, read up on a couple previous articles that I wrote that discusses Building Page Rank and Getting Indexed In Google fast .

Spamming your link.

I am sure you have seen tips on commenting in guest-books, blogs, forums and so on so fourth. There is a difference between posting comments with a link in it and spamming it. Most of the time, you have the option of including your link when posting in a blog or guest-book. In a forum you can include your link in your signature. Don’t just down right spam your link all over fast in hopes of getting traffic and links back to your site. This won’t help and you will get banned and more than likely your post will be deleted. Nobody likes a spammer, not even you.

Quit worrying about ranking.

Everyone seems to obsess and fret over Google page rank more than they should. If you keep up with the key fundamentals of running a website or a blog, your ranking will go up more and more as time goes on. Quit worrying about it because just focusing on this will end up cramping your style. Focus on keeping your site and/or blog updated with fresh unique content daily, interacting with your visitors, users, and other blog members, and keep doing basic SEO on your pages and you will be fine. Also, quit checking your rankings every single day. They are going to do what they are gonna do, let them be and stay focused.

This list can go on and on…and on! These are some key tips to running a successful site and keeping your optimization A-1. If you have any other tips feel free to comment.

Getting indexed in Google fast

Here are some simple SEO Tips.

A great way of getting known in search engines for certain keywords is backlinking. How you ask? This is simple, make sure you are getting links from a quality site with unique content and a good page ranking. But what we are going to discuss is anchor text and what is anchor text. You can use this in guest blogging.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is just some basic HTML. Basically you are linking back to your website (back linking) and using keywords in your link. these keywords should be ones that you are trying to rank for in which this is a great SEO method on ranking higher.

Here is an example of what anchor text is.

< a href=”linktoyoursite.com” > Your Keyword here </a>

And you would get Your Keyword Here

Here is my example that I actually did in this article.

SEO Tips

Now you see that it links back to my website but is using a keyword that I am trying to rank for. Now here is something else I want to discuss. It is called “Alt Text” / “Title” . Alternative text / Title is a description of your link when someone hovers over it. If you hover over the link above it will say “SEO Tricks“. This also helps.

Why isn’t the alt text/link title the same as the keyword?

I am doing this because you want a keyword density of about 6%. So you don’t want to use the same keywords more than once or twice in an article. So if you plan on using it 5 times make sure to change the keywords up to maybe instead of SEO Techniques to SEO Technique or something similar.

So here are two examples of how to do this using alt and title.

<a title=”SEO Technique” href=”http://www.therantandrave.net/”>SEO Techniques</a>

<a href=”http://www.therantandrave.net/” alt=”SEO Technique”>SEO Techniques</a>

And these are just some basic SEO Tips on how to get indexed in Google fast.

Any questions?

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SEO , Seo Tips, anchor text, black-links, backlinking, backlinks, keywords, get indexed in google fast, getting indexed in google fast