I Have My Keywords … Now What?
By Matt McGee on May 1, 2007 | comments (16)
Like many other search marketers, I spend a fair amount of time impressing on clients the need for keyword research. But when that process is done, I’m often asked, “Now what?” We spend a lot of time stressing the need to locate the right keywords, but maybe not as much time on how to use them.
So, here’s a quick primer on the “perfect storm” of keyword usage inside a web site.
Let’s say you have a section/page on the web site with a collection of articles devoted to real estate advice –- helpful tips and information for people selling a house. You’ve decided the primary keyword for this page is “home selling tips.” That exact keyword should appear in the following six places:
- In the page title.
- In at least one, preferably more, text links pointing to the page; i.e., home selling tips >>
- In the URL of the page; i.e., http://www.yourdomain.com/home-selling-tips.html — note, however, that two dashes is what I’d consider to be the limit. If your keyword is 4-5 words, I wouldn’t recommend writing it out with dashes like this. I’d shorten it to 1-2 dashes at most to avoid having a spammy-looking URL.
- In the header tag of the page text; i.e., h1 = Home Selling Tips
- In the page text; i.e., “The following home selling tips will help make the experience of putting your home on the market more enjoyable, and should help you sell your house for the best price.”
- In the META description tag; i.e., META name=”description” content=”Home selling tips and advice from John Doe, a licensed real estate agent serving Spokane, Washington (WA). If you have questions about how to sell a home for the best price, this article will help… blah-blah.”
I’ve listed these in order of importance, so if something prevents you from placing the keyword in all six places, you can prioritize them as I have above. (Frankly, I expect I’ll get a comment or two saying this list risks the proverbial “over-optimization” penalty, and it would be better not to put the keyword in all six places. We’ll see.)
Now, how about a 3-part disclaimer?
1. Page titles need to be unique. So if there’s some reason why you must have more than one page targeting the same keyword, make sure your page titles aren’t the same. Ditto for meta tags.
2. Anchor text is also best when it varies from link to link. Don’t stuff the keyword into every link on your site that points to this page.
3. With the header tags (h1, h2, etc.) and the page text, always write naturally. Don’t stuff the keyword unnaturally. Use similar/related phrases and always write with humans in mind.
There you go. Six steps toward proper keyword usage. What would you add? What would you change?
- Meta tags: Keywords, Description, etc.
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On May 3, 2007, earlpearl said:
Very clear Matt. Nice tips. Just caught this from Rebecca at seomoz. Need to get over here more often.
Dave
On May 3, 2007, Miriam said:
Picture perfect, Matt.
The next step…getting those keywords used in the backlinks pointing to your website from outside sources:)
Miriam
On May 3, 2007, Matt McGee said:
Thx for the comments, earl and Miriam – glad you liked it. (And thx to Rebecca for the post/link, of course.)
On May 7, 2007, Mariusz said:
It is good idea to put right keywords in alts, names of images.
Very nice post.
On Aug 11, 2008, Vikram said:
Great post Matt,
any tips on how to select the right keywords out of the lot?
Vikram
On Jan 19, 2009, Fonz said:
Over-optimization is not an issue here as long as you keep it all readable. Maybe adding your content to an ´article submission website´ like Digg.
On Feb 11, 2009, Woody said:
Hi Matt,
All good stuff, much of which I have used and will continue to do so until G**gle changes its algorithm again.
As an aside, we all know the benefits of article submission, what are your thoughts on press releases? Its not a strategy I’ve really tried before, but was thinking of giving it a go for a couple of new sites we’ve just launched.
Thanks again for a great reference site.
On May 12, 2009, Callie said:
Fantastic tips that I will definitely be putting to use!
On Mar 12, 2010, Amanda said:
I just wanted to point out that you have 5 dashes in this website address although you recommend 1-2 at most. So it must not be that bad??
On Aug 7, 2010, Danielle said:
Thanks for this article. I’m still a little fuzzy on the process, to be honest with you, but I think that has more to do with the fact that I am very new to blogging in the current blogosphere (I had one years ago, though) and SEO. I do believe I’ll get there, though, and articles – and blogs – like this one are very valuable. Thanks, again.
Not sure if you could answer this, but it doesn’t hurt to ask – what if you want to capitalize on the misspelling of a keyword (or phrase) to nab that traffic, would you then have to actually use that misspelling in your title and content?
On Aug 10, 2010, Matt McGee said:
Hi Danielle — yes, I suppose if you’re specifically looking to optimize for a misspelling you would need to use the misspelling. But all of the search engines are getting very good at correcting misspellings when people search. In many cases, Google will even ignore the fact that the searcher misspelled the search term and will show search results for the correctly spelled version.