Completed So Far:
My blog is up and running, and beginning to look pretty good. I have developed my list of powerful keywords and keyphrases, and now I will look at where and how to use these keywords and keyphrases.
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New Developments:
You have taken the time to carefully select powerful keywords that not only represent your site, but are also being used to in search engines to find sites like yours.
Now the trick is to effectively use these keywords in ways that help help search engines identify which words on your site are keywords and which are not. Unfortunately, you can’t just tell a search engine which keywords you have used on each page, you have to show them your keywords. The following guidelines will help you direct search engines to your site’s keywords:
- use one primary keyword per page, supported by two or three secondary keywords. Use your list of powerful keywords to select one primary keyword and a couple of secondary keywords for each page of your site. The primary keyword should be placed in all of the major placement spots (more below on these), with the secondary keywords scattered throughout the page’s content. A secondary keyword from one page could be used as a primary keyword on another page (and vice versa).
- place your primary keyword in the page’s title and in all headings and subheadings used on the page. If you don’t normally break your content into smaller chunks by using subheadings, you should probably start. More on the usefulness of subheadings in my next post, which will be about “Content”.
- place your primary and secondary keywords effectively throughout your content, particularly in, but not limited to, the first few sentences. Don’t over use keywords. An appropriate keyword density is generally thought to be between 3% and 5% of your word count. So, if you have 250 words on a page, between 8 and 13 of those words should be your keywords (or 3 to 5 keywords for every 100 words of content). Keywords should not affect the readability of the copy, they should appear naturally in sentences and paragraphs that are grammatically correct.
- highlight keywords by using bold or italics on them, or by underlining them.
- place keywords in and around hyperlinks. Never use ‘click here’ to identify an hyperlink. If you can’t place a keyword in the hyperlink, itself, then use keywords around the hyperlinks. Search engines are attracted to links, so will very likely notice these keywords.
- place keywords in bulleted lists.
- if you use Wordpress to create your blog, use both Categories and Tags to list keywords that are relevant to that post.
- use your strongest keyword, the one that is most representative of your entire site, in the site’s URL, in the site’s name (if at all possible) and in the site’s title and/or subtitle.
- remember to keyword optimize any Word documents or .pdf files that you attached to pages on your site.
Beautifully made hand-blown glass fish, hidden amongst the greenery like powerful keywords hidden on a website.
There are a few other extremely effective places where you can place keywords, but they involve HTML coding.
Accessing and changing HTML coding on pages, posts and in .pdf files can be a bit intimidating for anyone not used to HTML coding, so I will leave posting about this until later in this series, to when I post on Advanced Keyword Strategies.
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Next Step:
Writing for the web is different from writing for other types of media. The next post in the series, which will be published on Wednesday, looks as some of the tips and tricks involved with writing effectively for the Internet.
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If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog from the beginning by going to the Introduction post.
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