I’m writing for the business person who wants to understand keywords because they understand that keywords are essential to building website traffic. You may or may not want to do the keyword research yourself or any of the other steps involved in organic search engine optimization. However, a general understanding will enable you to know if your site is optimized and work efficiently with your search engine marketer on selecting keyword phrases.
Select 1 Keyword Phrase for Each Page
Once you select your keywords or your search engine marketer selects your keywords, they get assigned to individual pages. Ideally, I use one keyword phrase per page. Occasionally, I might use two if they are very closely related like web design and web designer or local vegetarian restaurants (with s) and local vegetarian restaurant. The reason I use just one keyword phrase is it gives me more leverage or shows commitment to Google. If a whole bunch of phrases are used on one page then they compete or cancel one another out.
So I use a different unique keyword phrase on each web page. In my opinion this step is as much an art as a science. When I optimize websites, I read all the main content pages and then match keyword phrases to the pages where they fit the best. If there isn’t a page that is a good match, I’ll write an additional page. Then I work the keyword phrases into the page text with a gentle hand. Firstly, I want the page to be readable, interesting and logical to the visitor. Secondly, I want the keyword phrase to appear at least 5 times and at least 2 x’s in the first 100 words. Many of my clients are adept writers so sometimes they do this step or sometimes I do.
Placement of Keyword Phrases
Last step of organic optimization. Once I’ve assigned the keyword phrases to the main site pages and worked them into the content, I then load them into all the metatags. To me that means the page titles, metatags, Google descriptions and file names. I find it very satisfying to put the same keyword phrases in all fields of a single page. When I’m done all the keyword phrases are reinforcing each other. This step is usually carried out by your programmer or sometimes by you the website owner.
Questions about keywords and organic search engine optimization? Feel free to ask.