When it comes to creating content for your website you want to be sure that you are going to be showing up in Google for your main keywords, we all know this and by now most businesses have worked on getting their meta information in place so their Page Title and Meta Descriptions show their nice keywords and an enticing welcome for internet searchers. Where businesses are now lacking is bringing these keywords into the websites actual page content, to increase their on page optimisation score and further boost their rankings not to mention conversions if strategically placed.
Google isn’t dumb, they know when you put a keyword on a page just for the sake of it so they don’t give brownie points for keyword stuffing (the art of filling up your sentences so every second word is a keyword and it doesn’t actually make that much sense to humans). They do though have a collection of general keyword usages that they look out for on your page to ensure that your content, website and therefore business is relevant to what people are searching for. Out 9 SEO tips for your business keywords will show you how to optimise your page for your keywords.
Before you dive in, remember that on page optimisation will only increase traffic and conversions if you are targeting the right keywords in the first place (many businesses get this wrong). There are four golden rules to selecting profitable keywords, they MUST have:
- Good search volume
- Commercial value
- Low enough competition
- High commercial intent (is someone actually looking to buy your product or service when they type in this keyword)
Targeting the wrong keywords will send you down the wrong path and can really hurt your revenue. Don’t start rushing in to populate your keywords unless you have already done some heavy lifting in the keyword gym and are sure you have a list of main and secondary keywords to knock the socks off your opposition. The screen shot to the right shows the level of detail we go to when selecting the most profitable keywords to target for a website, content strategy or link building campaign.
So assuming you have select the most profitable keywords for your website let’s get into optimising your page content using them!
Top 9 keyword placement seo tips
1. Each page (article, post etc) of content should be between 500-1000 words long
Creating a page that only has 100 words on it, is pretty much a waste of your time. Unless you are providing great content you aren’t going to get all of the benefits of talking about the topic and could potentially leave your readers asking questions that your website doesn’t answer.
2. Use your primary keyword at least one time in each 80-100 words and each secondary keyword at least one time in each 400-500 words
Each page of your website should be mapped out with one primary keyword (the main focus of the page) and 3-4 secondary keywords. When you write (or edit) the content of your page you need to include these words to make the content relevant. Your primary keyword should be repeated a few times throughout and your secondary every so often, maybe once or twice in the page depending on its length.
3. Use your primary keyword in the title of the page, article or post
Each of your pages should have a title that is created using the <h1> heading tag. When you create this title it should include your primary keyword as this is given more emphasis than your page content.
4. Use the primary keyword in the first and last sentence of your page, article or post
This is one that you should be aiming to do anyway, include your primary keyword at the beginning and the end to introduce people to the topic and remind them why they just read your page: nice simple grammar we should have all learnt in school.
5. Include at least 2 sub-titles with the primary keyword of the page, article or post (one H2 and one H3)
A large article should always be built out with sub headings to show the different sections of the page, these subheadings should include your primary keyword. If your keyword is Bundaberg Accommodation your sub headings could be Bundaberg Accommodation Facilities and Things to do near your Bundaberg Accommodation.
6. Include the primary keyword in the first part of your meta description (and remember it needs to be unique for every page on your site)
Getting back to the Meta Description we mentioned earlier, you need to ensure your primary keyword is included towards the beginning. This is a basic SEO rule that provides emphasis to search engines and also shows searchers that your page content is relevant to what they are looking for.
7. Include at least one image in each post optimised for the primary keyword including the image name and alt tag.
No one wants to look at a long page with no images, when you create your page content make sure you include relevant images that are named appropriately with the keyword and have an alt tag also including that keyword, remember, search engines cannot see images, they rely on the image name and alt tag to find out what the image is ‘about’.
8. Include one primary keyword in bold and one italicised
Throughout your text, where most appropriate you should format your primary keyword so it is bolded and italicised once each. In our case we have included seo tips and seo tips throughout our content.
9. Use your keyword as part of your website permalink (extended domain name for pages i.e. www.mywebschool.com/blog/seo/seo-tips).
When you create your page you should be able to determine the URL that will show for that page, you should always work to include the keyword as part of it and when in two parts separate the word with a hyphen.
Achieving all 9 of the seo tips for your page content can take some work and a little discipline to get used to doing it each time. If you are lucky and are operating on a great CMS like WordPress there are plugins available that will help this process for you. On our new Smart Accommodation Website we have included the Easy WP SEO Keyword Optimiser plugin to help our clients out with optimising their content.
The plugin reviews all of the content that you have provided, your meta information, your page link (everything!) and gives you a ranking and suggestions for improvement, it’s amazing and just like having this seo tips article in your website guiding you and telling what you write.
Final word – even if you do nothing else, get a ranking report set-up so you can see how much potential business you are missing out on. We use Rank Tracker and tie it into our clients Google Analytics accounts so the report pulls the actual traffic they get compared to what they could receive for a number 1 spot. Rank tracker is a bit pricey and requires an annual subscription but another free option is Cute Rank Checker which doesn’t have all the bells and whistles but will still give you a great report from which you can start making some strategic online marketing decisions.