This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
SEO is all about making your page as relevant as possible to a target keyword used in a search engine. Perhaps the most important, and famous, aspect of this is through the use of keywords. However, just throwing a keyword on a page a few times won’t do much to signal that your page is useful and relevant to a user’s search. You need to use your keywords in the right way, in the right places, to show search engines that your website can help a searcher achieve their goal. On the flip side, using keywords in just the right places will help you attract visitors who are looking for what your website is offering.
In this piece we’ll go over 10 most valuable places you should, and shouldn’t, include keywords on your page.
1. URL
The structure and words you use in your URLs are very important. Optimized URLs are vital for search engines and human usability, and play a big part in your SEO. Use keywords in your URL to tell readers how relevant the page is to a keyword and what sort of content they should expect to find on the page.
If you have an ecommerce site, use your category, sub-category and product keywords in the URL. A URL like http://ift.tt/2d9cbYS tells search engines a lot more about the page and what it’s about than something like http://ift.tt/2dxSa0H. Search engines crawling the URL can see immediately that the page will be relevant to searches about men’s brown leather shoes, while the second URL doesn’t provide any such clues.
If your keywords contain multiple words, use hyphens between words and avoid stop words (to, at, with, etc.). Search engines don’t recognize underscores, so they see http://ift.tt/2d9bn6h the same as http://ift.tt/2dxQPXw. This is a problem because humans obviously use spaces when searching, which means a URL containing underscores won’t appear as relevant to a search for "brown leather shoes."
Optimizing your URLs with keywords is also helpful for linking purposes. Research has shown that URLs using keywords makes links using keywords as anchor text more likely, which makes for a more valuable link. In instances where people add links to your site without specifying anchor text, usually by just copying and pasting the URL into the text, the URL itself will become the anchor text. Using your keywords in the URL will ensure that in these cases, your anchor text will include keywords.
2. Title Tag
A page’s title is indicated in the page’s <head>. When implemented correctly, it looks like this:
<title>This is the Title</title>
Title tags serve a lot of purposes: They’re used by browsers for tabs and bookmark descriptions and by social media sites when you share a link. They’re also one of your most important parts of on page SEO. Search engines rely on title tags maybe more than any other element when figuring out the topic of a page, so it’s important to optimize page titles for your target keywords. Use your keywords at the beginning of the title for the best effect. If you want to include multiple keywords, or your location for local SEO, use the pipe character (|), to separate them.
Titles that are too long will be cut off, so keep them less than 60 characters (including spaces), with an ideal length between 50-60 characters. Search engines have developed a talent for determining when someone is trying to manipulate them. Adding too many keywords, or repeating the same keyword over and over again, will make your page look bad and hurt your SEO. This page, for example, stuffed its title tag with several keywords related to watches and appears on the 21st page of Google search results.
3. Meta Description
Meta descriptions aren’t used as a ranking factor by search engines, but you can still use your keyword here to improve your SEO. Search engines combine meta descriptions with title tags and URLs to create a page’s search snippet. Meta descriptions are implemented in the document <head> and look like this:
<meta name="description” content=”A short page description, no more than 160 characters Keywords appear in bold.” />
Think of search snippets as an opportunity to advertise the content on your page. Keywords matching search terms will appear in bold, so use them in your meta description to entice users to click through to your site. Along with keywords, try to use words/phrases like "cheap," “deals” or “free shipping,” to further encourage click through. Search engines use click-through rate (CTR) as a ranking signal, so having an optimized meta description will help your SEO.
Make sure your meta descriptions accurately describe what users will find on the page. A bad meta description won’t directly hurt your ranking, but it could result in a high bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave your site without interacting with any pages beyond the landing page). This is a clue that your page is irrelevant to the keyword.
4. Page Content
Your page content is the backbone of your site, and theoretically the whole reason your page exists in the first place. In the old days, optimizing your content meant loading up the beginning of your page with keywords and synonyms. However, since Google’s Panda update, that sort of keyword-saturated content looks like useless spam and you’ll struggle to get much organic search traffic.
Instead, focus on creating content that covers the topic in-depth and at length. Google likes long content — the average top ten page has right around 2,000 words. Concentrating on covering the topic authoritatively will allow you to use keywords throughout the page. It will also naturally allow you to use latent semantic keywords. Latent semantic keywords are words that are topically associated with other words. It’s one of the ways search engines tell the difference between a page about swimming pools and a page about billiards. They help strengthen your page’s ties to a particular topic, which can improve your search ranking.
Your content also needs to be unique and high quality. Duplicating or spinning content won’t cause a penalty, but it will keep you from ranking in search results. Completely copying content could cause Google to leave you out of search results completely. You also need to proofread your content as spelling, grammar and vocabulary mistakes make your site look bad and cause a high bounce rate.
The good news is that if you are creating high-quality, in-depth content, you’re likely creating evergreen content. Evergreen content stays relevant and ranks for a long period of time (think months or years, instead of days or weeks). It also serves as linkbait to make your off page SEO efforts a little bit easier.
5. Headers and Sub-heads
Like title tags, search engines pay close attention to headers and sub-heads as clues regarding a page’s content, particularly the <h1> tag. The <h1> tag is the most important header on the page and serves as the title for the page’s content, so you absolutely need to include your keyword here. Note, however, that the <h1> header is NOT the same thing as the title tag. Use sub-heads, <h2> through to <h6>, to order and structure your content and use your keywords consistently throughout the page. Your h1 doesn’t need to be exactly the same as your title tag, but it should be pretty close.
Continue reading %10 Most Valuable Places for Your Keywords%
by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint
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