SEO-it Article: The Key to Keywords
It's nothing new to mention that keywords are used in search engine optimisation and remain an important aspect of it. However, miss-usage of keywords over the last few years has had consequences, now we have to use them properly and effectively or we'll be penalised.
Think of keywords as a way to summarise and index the main goals of a webpage. If your website was a book, and you wanted create an index in the back, for each page think only of keywords that you would find useful if you were taken there by the index.
Less Is More
This is all about something known as keyword density, you want the keywords you enter into your metadata to be seen as the vital identity of your page. Fill the keywords field with a while heap of irrelevant keywords and the importance of them will become diluted.
In your keywords field, enter just the important keywords for your page, not only this, prove that they are important keywords by using them throughout your pages' content, this will increase the density and make them more relevant.
Put your keywords into your paragraphs of text, in the page titles and headers, don't go overkill, remember that the content is for the visitors for your site at the end of the day, though make it easy for them to get an idea of what the page's about, not just the search engines.
Be Specific
When choosing your keywords and placing them in your titles and page content, don't generalise and use them like everyone else, be specific and make sure you get those accurate results.
If your business is distributing vitamins, don't have just ‘vitamins' as a keyword if you specialise in herbal vitamins. Use ‘herbal vitamins', and reflect this in your content and titles. It will help index your site with more relevance and help tell your customer what you're all about.
Dedicated sites
If you sell a number of products, though one stands out as a market leader, something that could be a winner in on it's own, why not give it it's own dedicated site.
By creating a new site, with a domain name that is specific to that product and/or it's function, your keywords will be matched up with this domain name and will really increase your results. Further from this, you can tailor the whole site for this particular product.
This method of increasing the visibility of a specific product online is a cheap but very effective method of getting yourself out there. You already have the brand and product information, quote possibly most of the content, so it's just getting a developer to put this into a new site.
Further more, this product may be made by you, so there's nothing wrong with mentioning this in the content and referring (sensibly) back to your parent website, it will all go to helping both sites.
It's no secret that SEO-it.co.uk is a child website of Red Cherry Solutions, we didn't want all of this information getting lost and clogging up our parent site, so we dedicated the search engine optimisation aspect of our business to a site of it's own.
Image Relevance
If you're undertaking the idea of accessibility on your website, you'll realise that images need to have alt tags, alt tags being a alternate piece of text to the image that is displayed as a market for the image, and in text only mode can describe what the images is. Especially useful for those with sight problems that use screen readers.
If your page is about your new Blue Keyring, and there's an image of it, put ‘Blue Keyring' into the alt tag, don't leave it blank or put ‘product code 1526'. Describe the image in the alt tag, it'll identify its relevant, matching up to your keywords and increasing your keyword density once more.
Further to this, the actual name of the image itself is important, search engines display results for image searches now and read filenames like they do alt tags to make sure that everything is related and cliquey. Name your image from above to ‘blue-keyring.jpg' and it'll be up there in the image results before you know it.
Summary
Your keywords need to be spot on, tailor them for each page, tailor your content and tell your visitors what words are important, the search engines soon follow suit.
Good Luck!
Team SEO-it.co.uk
