Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an important conversation every business owner should have with their web developer. It’s not enough anymore to have a pretty site that functions well; websites have to be written and coded in a way that will make them findable by search engines. Because once a search engine can find your website, your audience can and will find your website.
In the first part of this series on the basics of SEO, we’ll focus on Keywords.
Keywords are the words or phrases that you would type into a search engine to find your business. For example, a cake bakery in New York might optimize pages for words like: “birthday cakes NYC,” “cake shop New York,” or “wedding cakes 10001.”
Once you target these keywords (watch and learn the simple three-step process here) you can now start integrating them into your website content.
Some pointers:
Location, Location, Location.
Where you put your keywords on the page also matters. Page titles, headlines (the text between <H1> tags) and hyperlinked phrases hold more weight with search engines than regular body text, so integrating a keyword or phrase into any of these categories is even more beneficial toward your SEO goals.
Repetition is OK.
When you write your web copy, you may begin to feel you’re being overly repetitive by using the same words and phrases again and again. You should avoid going overboard with keyword integration, but a little repetition is OK when it comes to writing web copy.
Pare down.
Stick to 2 or 3 keywords or phrases per page. If we take the cake bakery example again, the Wedding page would want to focus the content around “wedding cakes nyc” and “wedding cake shop new york.” Having a clear focus helps the search engines understand what they’re reading.
Stay tuned for our next piece of the SEO puzzle on inbound links…
Thanks for sharing that idea..
I would like to hear your thoughts about Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)? From what I’ve heard in “Natural Traffic 2.0″, that’s the new big thing, and using several different keywords is key?
Hi Lars,
Thank you for your comment. Interestingly enough, you bring up a very hot-button topic going on right now in the SEO community. Instead of rankings being keyword-only-driven, many believe that Google is using other word relationship algorithms in its ranking system. LSI is the biggest theory – that Google is using a system that collects information more like a human naturally looks at content: examining the document collection as a whole, where similar words support an overall theme and understanding.
If this theory is true or not, one thing is for certain, phrase relationships are important to search engines when processing queries, and the wider net of related keywords you include in your content, the steadier your rankings will be.
This post was meant to be a first “building block” to the general understanding of keywords’ important in site content and searchability, with more complex ideas to follow.
Again, thank you for your comment and interest. Here is an article I found that you may find interesting about LSI in more depth. It’s hard to say what Google is really doing, but point blank: keywords matter.
Stay tuned for more SEO tips!
-Christine
[...] discussed the importance of keywords in Part One of this SEO How-To series, but we didn’t get into how to really choose the right ones for your [...]
[...] how to properly and effectively incorporate them into your content, see our SEO Keyword Guide here. Depending on the content management system your website is based in, it will vary where you [...]