Use Keywords to Achieve Stellar SEO

February 14, 2015

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Use Keywords to Achieve Stellar SEOLooking to improve your page performance but not sure how? We’ve got you covered.
How well your website pages perform is closely linked to the search engine optimization (SEO) techniques you’ve implemented. On the surface SEO might sound like a scary and difficult task to take on, but in reality there’s a lot you can do in a fairly simple fashion.

5 Places to Add Keywords on Your Website: On-Page SEO Techniques

The secret to on-page optimization is to insert keywords within the pages of your site in places that are easy for search engines to notice when crawling through it. However, keep in mind that when you optimize the pages of your website, select ONE keyword to optimize each page for to avoid a black hat SEO technique known as keyword stuffing.

1. Page Titles

While it’s important for your website’s page titles to reflect the organization of your content, naming the pages of your site should also be a strategic move to improve your SEO.

Page titles are highly valued areas of your website. Google looks at your page titles when calculating how to rank your site on a search engine results page (SERP), so including keywords here is crucial.

Your page title shows up in blue on the Google SERP.

Add Keywords to Page Title

As you can see from the example above, we included the keywords “web design” and “Columbia, Mo” in the title for the home page of our website, helping our site rank #3 on the SERP when searching for “web design columbia mo.”

When it comes to writing page titles, you need to master the art of writing a catchy title while also ensuring you’ve included appropriate keywords. The catchy title is going to incline someone to click on your website link when it pops up on the results page; meanwhile, the keywords are going help your website show up on the SERP when the topic is researched.

2. Page URL

Many times you’ll see a page URL match exactly with the page title, but this doesn’t always have to be the case.

Creating a page URL that is slightly different from the page title is one way to help you get the best results all around when it comes to SEO. If you focus your page title to be more inviting and catchy (while still getting some keywords in there), you can optimize your page URL, which is less noticeable to searchers, to solely include relevant keywords, excluding the fluff words.

In the title you have a little more wiggle room to be creative with the words you choose to include. The URL, on the other hand, should be more direct and straightforward, using the words people will search with to find information on that topic. These techniques will help your page receive a higher ranking on a results page.

Add Keywords to Page URL

For this blog post, the page title is entered as “Use Keywords to Achieve Stellar SEO” while the URL has been edited to read “boost-seo-5-key-places-to-add-keywords-to-your-website”.

 

A good URL is going to accurately describe the contents of the page it links to while also remaining short and to the point. If you’re making a new webpage in WordPress, the URL is automatically created based on the page title you enter. However, you have the option to edit the URL to only include the words that are necessary. Often times we’ll take out the short, joining words (like “as”, “to”, “and”, etc.) and only leave the related keywords in the URL.

3. Page Headers

Page headers are the larger, bold titles you see throughout websites. In the web design world, they are referred to in a sort of hierarchy: H1, H2, H3, etc., with the initial header being first thing on a page, designed the largest, introducing your content.

For this blog post, “Use Keywords to Achieve Stellar SEO” is our H1. A secondary heading, or “5 Places to Add Keywords on Your Website: On-Page SEO Techniques,” would be an H2. “1. Page Titles” an H3, and so on.

This is another place to add keywords on your website pages. Webmasters often refer to these as header tags or h-tags. The most important h-tag is labeled “h1”. A secondary heading would be labeled “h2”, a sub-heading within the secondary heading would be “h3” and so forth until “h6”.

These header tags are meant to help describe the content within your page to improve SEO while also helping to keep your content organized and easy for readers to follow, sort of like an outline.

Header tags help with SEO because as search engine spiders crawl your website they’re checking to see if the keywords in your headers match the content presented on the rest of the page. When the spider sees matched keywords throughout your page, that will help your rankings and boost you up in the search results.

4. Content

A common myth about web content is that short-form content is preferred to web readers over long-form content. Nevertheless, serpIQ conducted a study to see how content length impacts a web page’s ranking on a search engine results page. Content length was measured by the number of words on the page.

Add Keywords to Content

Image from serpIQ.

As it turns out, as the average length of the content on the webpage decreased so did its position on the results page. According to their findings, 1st position pages have about 400 more words than 10th position pages, showing support for long-form content.

Therefore, when it comes to improving your SEO, strive to write longer content for your web pages, but don’t go crazy. Keep your content pertinent and interesting. Once you’ve got a visitor on the hook to view your website, it’s the high-quality, interesting content that will reel them in and keep them there.

5. Meta Description

Last, and actually quite possibly the least important, is adding keywords to your meta descriptions.

A meta description is the text that shows up in black on a Google search results page underneath the page title and URL.Add Keywords to Meta Description

Although Google’s ranking algorithm does not take meta description information into consideration it’s still important to include keywords here. A meta description is essentially your chance to advertise what your webpage is about in roughly 160 characters. Include keywords here that will help convince people to click on the link to your website as opposed to another website.

Google will bold text in your meta description that matches the words entered by the searcher. This helps the searcher to:

  1. Establish relevancy between their search and your content, and
  2. Decide if clicking on your link is going to transfer them to the content they need.

If you’re looking to improve your page performance, go through each blog post on your website and make sure each article utilizes these 5 on-page SEO techniques.

Who Manifested This Madness?

Monica Maye Pitts

This fabulous human, that's who.

Monica Maye Pitts

Monica is the creative force and founder of MayeCreate. She has a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture with an emphasis in Economics, Education and Plant Science from the University of Missouri. Monica possesses a rare combination of design savvy and technological know-how. Her clients know this quite well. Her passion for making friends and helping businesses grow gives her the skills she needs to make sure that each client, or friend, gets the attention and service he or she deserves.

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