How To Use Keywords

How to use Google SEO keywords: placing keywords throughout a page and a website can be critical when you are trying to improve search engine ranking as part of your search marketing strategy. Not just for Google, using keywords correctly helps all search engine rankings. Understand that the search engines can figure out what you should be about based upon other factors on and off of your site. But adding keywords makes it very clear what your site is about. Our advice is to use keywords when appropriate and necessary to make your content clear to the reader.

To understand what keywords are and why they are important to SEO, we have a separate blog post with a complete description.

But now we discuss how to place keywords on your site.

The first and most obvious use of keywords during the organic search engine optimisation (SEO) process is in the various meta tags located in the head section of the page’s HTML code. After carefully choosing the keywords that are relevant to the particular page, you should place these keywords in the title and meta description of the page.

Search engines use the title and meta description tags in the HEAD section of the page as a summary of what the page is about, so placing keywords within those tags is always helpful.

Keywords should also be used throughout the BODY content of the page. This typically does not prove to be a difficult process if the keywords you are trying to optimise for have been chosen correctly. Since they already reflect the theme and intent of the page, they will lend themselves to natural use in the text.

Search engines generally give more weight to the first 200 words within your page body section. Therefore, it is very important to make sure that keywords are used appropriately near the top of the page and proportionally throughout the page. The Single Page Analyser within the SEOToolSet® is an excellent SEO tool to help you visualise the distribution of keywords throughout the page.

It is also important to consider the use of keywords within the main body of your page. This is in displayed text, headings, images and anchor text (link text) when you are trying to improve your search engine optimisation efforts.

Using keywords appropriately to help your SEO within headings gives emphasis to the importance of those particular keywords to the theme of the page. Headings should be used as short descriptions (1-5 words) of the subject matter that follows, similar to chapter headers in a book. Incorporating keywords into these heading tags gives priority to these keywords in terms of their relevance.

The same can be said for the use of keywords within clickable link anchor text. Having keywords within anchor text implies that there is a link to another area on your site or externally that provides even more information related to these keywords, serving to enhance the idea this keyword is important to the theme of the site.

In addition to making sure that keywords are distributed well throughout the visible page content, also incorporate them into image alt attributes to reinforce the theme of the page. It is important that keywords used within alt text are truly relevant to the image. Keep your alt attributes to a length appropriate to the size of the image.

In the SEO process of incorporating keywords into a page and a site, it is extremely important to remember that keywords can be overused and become detrimental to search engine ranking. Doing search engine optimisation “SEO best practices” is critical – do not overdo it. To improve search engine ranking you need to be careful… if you cannot easily read your page content then you have overdone it. Keyword stuffing in meta tags, headings, anchor text, alt attributes, or the page content is an indicator of spam techniques. This practice is frowned upon by the search engines and can ultimately result in penalisation.

Use keywords if they are truly relevant to the subject matter and in a manner that makes sense to the average user. If it makes no sense, then do not include them… spam is not good. Google knows when keywords are “stuffed”, so do not do it.

We are hoping that you will like the SEO tips and advice, even free tools, in our great SEO Guide for how to do search engine optimisation, along with the rest of our SEO site.

More keyword help and free SEO tips:

• What Makes a Good SEO Keyword?
• How to Do Keyword Research