SEO Keywords Guide
Author: Stefan Vervoort | Please Comment!It has been a long time since I’ve wrote something about search engine optimizing and today we will talk about Keywords. Keywords play an important role in your search engine results and therefore it’s important to learn everything about this vital part of your blog or website. So, when and where to use keywords?
Keywords in the Title
Using the right keywords in your title tag can produce the results you are looking for. If people search on a relevant keyword your descriptive title tag will seduce people to click on your link. A title is the first thing the searcher sees in a search result and if that title includes the keywords they are looking for, they might click the link.
But what is the right title format? You should always use the most important keyword(s) in your title because that’s where people are looking for. For example, if you article is about webdesign and colors, you could name your title “Effective Colors In Webdesign”. You have written an interesting title, and you used the most important keywords.
HTML
<title>Effective Colors In Webdesign</title>
Keywords in the Description
A searcher will see a description in the search engine results right under the title, and it’s a important factor that makes people click your link. You should also include you most important keywords here as well, but make the description an explanation of your title. If people aren’t sure your article is helpful for them, use the description to convince them.
Keywords in the description doesn’t help you rank better, it just gives more information about your page to the search engine user.
What is a good description? Let’s go back to our example: “Effective Colors in Webdesign”. We could use “With this article you will be provided excellent examples on how to use colors in webdesign. Colors which are effective and awesome to see.”. If our example article is about this subject, it will give you an explanation of the title, right?
HTML
<meta name="description" content="With this article you will be provided excellent examples on how to use colors in webdesign. Colors which are effective and awesome to see. " />
Specified Keywords
You can specify the keywords you would like to have your article ranked on. The search engines use that (together with the keywords in the title and description) to determine what you page is about. The META keyword tag doesn’t work in Google, but Yahoo! still uses this tag. It doesn’t do much, but everything can help.
I recently learned you should use every keyword you add to this META tag only once, because a search engine links every keyword to each other. Back to our example, the following META tags do the same for your article, and the first one isn’t very good. The second one is better.
Wrong
<meta name="keywords" content="Effective color Webdesign, Effective color, color webdesign, webdesign color, colors webdesign" />
Correct
<meta name="keywords" content="Effective, Color, Webdesign" />
Keywords in Content
Usually this shouldn’t become a point a searcher will notice, but a search engine definitely does. Keyword density is the ratio of keywords against the total number of words in your content. Your content should have a maximum of 5% keywords on your whole article. Five percent is not a low percentage: 1 on the 20 words should a keyword.
Anyway, you shouldn’t forget you are writing your content for your readers. Just don’t stuff your article full of keywords if that makes the story uninteresting to read. You should use keywords where they fit in and here’s another thing, if you use too many keywords you will be punished by the search engines for keyword stuffing.
Keywords in Tags
Search engines see the HTML of the content and they mark some words surrounded by tags as more important then others. h1, h2, h3 tags will tell your visitors they are the title of an article, the chapters or the sub-chapters. The search engine scans a page in the same way and therefore those h1, h2 and h3 tags will be marked as more important. Read more about heading tags here.
But there are more more-important tags. strong and italic(em) tags are more important then your normal paragraphs, because they tell your visitors they are more important. Those words jump out of the paragraph because there is more weight on them. The search engine values those words in the same way: they are more important. Many other “special” tags are valued different by search engines.
So, putting keywords in special tags will only value those words as more important, which is great for you if it’s used correctly.
Keywords are important in Search Engine Optimizing
You have learnt why keywords are important for your search engine results. The secret is to use keywords in a responsible, yet effective way to use the search engines in your advantage. You should do that!
If you find any more ways to use keywords, don’t hesitate to add a comment to the conversation.
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8:12 pm on August 31st, 2008
Great Point on the keywords being only used once, and duplicates are ignored.
It’s important to note:
1. Keywords in description are not part of the SEO, just there to communicate to potential visitors sifting through search results.
2. Meta Keywords are pretty low on the scale of importance.
3. Content Keywords & page title keywords are king.
4:33 am on September 1st, 2008
very useful…. thanks
8:39 am on September 1st, 2008
im sorry but is this guide supposed to be a repost from 1999 - since when have META Keywords or Description contributed to your search engine position… oh yes that’s right, back in 1999!
Seriously, i tell clients that the best way to determine if an SEO actually knows hat they’re doing is to watch for people talking about META TAGS - they simply don’t work and demonstrate a complete lack of knowledge in current SEO techniques.
8:52 am on September 1st, 2008
@Matt - Thanks for your comment and you are right, but that’s close to exactly what I told in the article!
@Mark - My friend, is it possible you read the article in full? META tags ARE part of search engine optimizing. You optimize for the search engines and that also includes the look of your search engine result! About the keywords, sure they aren’t important, that’s why I stated that right after.
6:38 pm on September 1st, 2008
Hi stefan, I think the article is very clear, althouh I would review the section ‘keywords in the description’ to ensure that nothing is slightly ambiguous, just to satisfy those picky ones.
Personally I dont listen too much to advice against keyword stuffing. I have web pages stuffed to as high as 30% for testing purposes and they are still ranking high SERPs but i agree that from the editorial point of view it often makes the content look funny
David
7:28 pm on September 1st, 2008
@David - I did review the sections and changed a few lines.
Keyword stuffing, well I think you should write your content for your visitors (with 5% keywords at most) and not for the search engines. An article still has to remain some sort of style!
Thanks pal.
9:41 am on September 5th, 2008
this is particularly positive. Thanks..
2:53 pm on September 11th, 2008
I think you should put h1, h2, h3 in its order. Put h1 before h2, and h3 before h2
9:25 am on October 2nd, 2008
Nice set of basic SEO tips, all i would like to emphasise it the importance of the title tag, get the keywords you want to rank for in the title and you will save huge amounts of time when it comes to link building.
Peace.
11:00 am on October 17th, 2008
Hi
Thanks for the info
cheers
DC
9:56 pm on October 18th, 2008
This is a nice little intro in SEO….something that I just started to dive into. I think this post cleared up a few things for me.
Thanks.
1:11 pm on November 27th, 2008
Great thanks to you for giving such a necessary piece of information! I admire your work
10:41 pm on December 1st, 2008
More ways to use keywords… The first would be a the “title” tag in links on the other pages. It gives weight to the link. The second would be the “alt” tag for the images although it’s sort of compromised. This just means it should not be overused.
And the general advice: the more text on the page the better (more keywords in it). If the page is updated frequently and with right keywords - you’ve hit the jackpot.
7:52 am on December 12th, 2008
For anyone about to venture into the interesting world of SEO, then this is the place to be. There are some basic facts that can clear lots of personal queries. It’s quite Informative.
7:07 pm on December 17th, 2008
I find your site and blogs very informative. I have to disagree a touch - I SERPS do recognize the description. It is important to have keywords in all phases of SEO.
6:41 pm on December 26th, 2008
I have one question - what is the optimal title, description and keywords length? I heard many opinions, and every time it’s different. I personally do maximum of 70 symbols for title, 160 for description and keywords. Is that right?
7:15 pm on December 26th, 2008
@Mike D - I think that’s quite correct. Maybe it’s not the optimal length, but it is close.
1:34 pm on December 29th, 2008
What I have learned is, a major portion of on page SEO is about keyword. If you have found the relevant keywords to describe your product you have come half the way. The rest is to place them in such a way that it over all gives a high relevancy to the body text. You can place keywords in meta tags using, those character which engine cannot read like. Company | we are a company. Alt tags, external link anchors, internal links. This all matters. I have even advised some of our clients to use a separate set of keyword for all the pages. This works good, if your pages have individual body text. The in meta tags title and description carry more weight age but keyword tag still is important. It would be better if you keep description under 138, because Google snippet is limited to 138 words.
4:25 pm on December 30th, 2008
It is my contention that search engines will be moving away from the keywords meta tag, making it obsolete. I believe google has already begun this process in an effort to eliminate spam and retrieve relevant SERPS for their customers. Other search engines will soon follow this tactic.
7:19 pm on December 30th, 2008
Nice article about keywords. A great read for SEO novices.
3:36 pm on January 2nd, 2009
Great thanks to you for giving such a necessary piece of information! I admire your work