We all know that SEO is more than just 4 steps, however, it’s always good to start somewhere. This post will be talking about inserting your page keywords in 4 locations on your web page to help search engines and users understand what your page is all about. Please remember, optimising your webpages with keywords only will not improve your SEO, there are other element that need optimising, so please don’t stop here, but its a good start.
Before you start you need to ensure that you have selected the right keyword for your page. Often it’s not a business terminology, its what your customer would be searching for. So put your self in your customers’ place and choose a keyword they would be searching for.
Source: Google Trends
Right, let’s start, I will demonstrate the four changes on this blog post. The keyword I have selected is “Improve your SEO”.
Change 1: Add your keywords to the page web address
When search engines visit a website for the first time, they would look for guidance to understand (index) your pages. The first element they would look at is your page web address (URL). Therefore, its important that you include your keyword to the URL and ensure that it doesn’t include unwanted characters such as commas, question marks, equal signs, per cent signs and &’s.
Its also recommended that you dont separate words within the URL using spaces, or underscores. If you add a space between words, browsers would change that into “%20” which includes an unwanted characters as mentioned previously. Underscores are not recommended because search engines would completely ignore them. So if your use improve_your_seo search engines would see it as improveyourseo without any spaces. However, if you include hyphens/dashes, search engine would know that improve-your-seo are in fact three different words “improve your seo“.
Change 2: Include your keyword in the browser title
Browser title is also called Window title. This title appears at the top of your browser not within the page content. Search engines will use this as the title of your page’s link on their result pages. The page title is also used by social media websites such as Facebook and Google+ when sharing a link.
In our example, i used “4 changes that will improve your SEO – mooply.com” to be the page title of this post, when Google display the post in search this is how it appears
This post on Google search result page.
It is recommended that you used unique page titles for each web page, and they don’t not exceed 70 characters (including spaces) as this is what search engines would display on their result pages. Anything beyond 70 characters will be hidden.
Change 3: Include your keyword in the head tags
As you would expect when reading a book, research or a blog, you would expect seeing titles and subtitles. These would help you understand the content of a section or a paragraph.
Similarly, on webpages users expect to see titles and subtitles. Those are called head tags (<h1> <h2> … etc). Search engines as well as users scan for these to understand the content without having to read the page word by word. In my opinion, head tags are the most important elements within the page content (between <body></body> tags). Therefore it’s crucial that you use them and ensure that each page within your website has an optimised unique <h1> and a few <h2> tags.
Change 4: Use your keyword in the content
The mistake that many web masters do is focusing on the “keyword density” – which I consider a yesteryear term – and SEO copywriting, but forget anchor links (linked text), highlighting tags and multimedia optimisation. Even if the keyword is not 3% of the text, you can still optimise your web page. Use the keyword in your video caption, your image alternative text (alt tag) or title tag, link your keywords to a relevant internal or external link, use bold or italic to highlight you keywords. All that would make your keyword standout for users as well as search engines.
What you cannot do is write your content for the sake of search engines, no matter how careful you are, you can’t fool search engines. Write your content for the user and your business and search engines will reward you. But if you write for search engine only, Panda will be waiting with the relevant punishment.
I hope this helps, if it does or you have any questions, please leave a comment.
Thank you for reading and sharing.
Leave a Reply