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How To Use Keywords

How To Use Keywords

Owned by Tom Mulhern (Deactivated)
Last updated: May 17, 2022
3 min read

How do search engines know what your keywords are, anyway? The search engines crawl around a website looking for naturally repeated words, phrases and related words. These "key words" clue the search engines in to what topics the site is about, and the search engines' advanced topic-modeling algorithms confirm it.

If you don't establish clear subject relevance through keywords, your pages won’t be indexed properly and won't rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Where you use keywords in your content matters. Too few mentions of your keywords can leave the search engines wondering what your content is about; and too many repetitions tell the search engines you're a spammer.

Once you decide what the primary keywords should be on a page, you'll want to create content that includes the phrase naturally and evenly throughout the page.

SEO Copywriting Tips for the Head Section

The head section, hidden in a web page's HTML code, is read by search engines and critical for SEO. What you write in the head section not only tells search engines what your page is about, it's also the text they usually display in your SERP listings. Also, the keywords the user searched for appear in bold in the title and description of search results (as shown below).

People click through to your site more often if they see what they're looking for, bolded within your listing. So use your best marketing know-how and write these tags to attract clicks.

Below are some SEO Best-Practices.

  • Title Tag: The title is the most important tag and usually shows up as the blue link in the SERPs. As a guideline, the title length should be 50 to 70 characters. It’s important to be mindful of the length, as Google cuts off titles at the column edge, so place your primary keyword near the beginning to be found.

  • Meta Description: Search engines display a page's meta description as the black description text, if it's applicable to the search query. Write sentences that accurately describe the page content AND motivate searchers to click. Use an appropriate keyword phrase, since words matching the search query are bolded. It’s important to place keywords within the first 160 characters including spaces. Don't use a keyword more than twice in the meta description.

SEO Guidelines for the Body Section

What the head section promises, the body section must deliver. The body section is what users see when they visit your web page; it must give the reader what they expect to find. Throughout your high-quality content, you'll need to include your keywords and natural language about those keywords.

The SEO tips below tell you where to put your keywords:

  • Headings: Write a headline for your page in an H1 heading tag, indicating what the page is about. Your heading should include your main keyword and correspond to your page title tag. Optionally, you can create H2 and H3 headings sequentially if you want to break up a lot of text content on the page.

  • First words: The first 200 words of body copy count most heavily for search engines and for users, since most users never scroll down to see what's "below the fold." Be sure to use keywords there.

  • Body text: Include keywords occasionally and evenly throughout your body copy. If you stay on topic when you're writing, this should happen naturally. Don't force keywords where they don’t sound natural.

  • Clarifying Words: Be sure to place clarifying words near the keywords in the first 200 words and throughout your content. Clarifying words include word-stemming variations (e.g., write, writing, writes, writer), synonyms, and closely associated words that help clarify the keyword's context and meaning (e.g., web, content and copy with the keyword "writing").

  • Images: Images and other types of rich media increase user engagement and the stickiness of your web page. Images also give search engines another reason to offer users your page. An image's file name, surrounding text and alt attribute all contribute to relevance for ranking. If the image is linked, search engines treat the alt attribute as anchor text. So, always write an alt attribute that is a brief description with a keyword, if possible, identifying what the image shows.

  • Links: Link to relevant pages within your own site using keyword-rich anchor text. Make your site's internal linking useful for the visitor. You can also link out to high-quality external sites if they're relevant to the page's subject. You can also place these links after the first 200 words and not in your global navigation.