Monday, July 27, 2009

How to Effectively Use Keywords

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/XUTzT)

Websites are now aware of the great importance of rankings in the major search engines. One of the most effective ways to enhance rankings is by using keywords. It should be incorporated in your online marketing strategy. The use of keywords is very important in SEO.



Are you familiar with meta tags? These are located on the head sections of your pages – the html codes. Make sure that you choose the appropriate keyword for the page. Such keywords need to be placed in the tag ‘Meta Keywords’. The first letter of the keyword should be capitalized and they should be in order. Another thing that you should keep in mind is that such keywords need to be strategically placed on the title, description, and throughout the page’s content.



Keywords should be chosen carefully especially the ones that you want to optimize. If you know how to optimize keywords effectively, it will not be very difficult and you can expect more traffic on the site. With experience, the use of the keywords will be more natural as it is already reflected on the intent and theme of the page.



The first 200 words of a certain page are critical for keyword optimization. You must learn to appropriately place the keywords on the top of the page and it should be proportionally distributed on the page. There are several SEO tools that you can use online like the SEOToolset. The tool will help you to visualize effective keyword distribution on a page.



If you want to further improve your rankings on search engines, it is vital that you also use them in link text or anchor text and in headings. If you use the appropriate keywords on the headings, you will also emphasize its importance to the page’s theme. Your headings should be limited to 1-5 words. Short descriptions are more effective if you use proper keywords. The keywords should always be relevant to achieve higher rankings. As with the anchor text, you should also use relevant keywords. By using keywords on the anchor text, it only implies that the reader can find additional information within the site or in another related website. Enhancing keywords is very important to the overall theme of the site. The page’s theme can also be reinforced by incorporating image ALT attributes together with visible page contents. When using keywords in ALT text, make sure that it is related to the image and another thing is that the length of the ALT text should appropriate to the image size.



Keywords are often overused by some websites which can be detrimental to your site’s rankings in search engines. The most common problem is keyword stuffing in the meta tags, anchor text, alt attributes, headings and anywhere within the page. Keyword stuffing is a spam technique and most search engines frown at such practice. Your site can also be penalized by using keywords abusively. Remember that only relevant keywords should be used for a page so that internet users can understand its contents.

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