Here are ten useful tips for website owners specifically related to usage of keywords to improve performance in search results.
- Think of what someone looking for your type of product/service might type into a search query.
- Write down a list of keywords/terms.
- Think of common variations and modifiers for those terms and add them to your list.
- Examine your website to see if those keywords already appear or find ways of adding extra text to incorporate the most important keywords.
- Top priority is to make it human readable – you don’t want to turn people away by having your site not easy to read or seeming spammy.
- The words in your titles and headings are given most importance by the search engines so your most important keywords should be here. The title is meta data and does not appear on the page itself but appears at the top of your browser window and also in search results. Headings do appear on your page and there are a number of different levels of headings – H1, H2, H3, etc. H1 is the top level heading and is given the most importance. Ideally you should just have one H1 heading on your page.
- Keep the title and the main heading similar, but it is a good idea to vary them a little from each other in order to incorporate different variations of your important keywords.
- Don’t stuff your titles and headings with keywords – this looks spammy and can dilute the effect of your keywords.
- Some tools that can help you find important variations on your keywords: Google Adwords Keyword Tool, SEOBook Keyword Tool, Quintura, Google Search Based Keyword Tool, Google.com (click wonder wheel and/or related searches).
- You can add a new article, page or blog post to your website on a topic centred around some keyword or term that you want to get found for. But don’t make it look spammy or manipulative – write primarily for the real people visiting your website and make sure it sits naturally into your website structure.