OPTIMIZE

Content and META-data:
Placing Keywords Within Your Content

Now that you know the keywords that you want your pages to rank well for, it is time to implement these on your web pages. The big question for many people is: "How do I do that?"

Basically, you implement your keywords by using them on your web pages. It's that simple! The first and most important thing that you need to do is use the words or phrases that you want search users to find you for throughout the text on your web pages.

Some people confuse adding keywords to a web page with the META-keyword tag. As you will learn in the next section, the META-keyword tag does not count much in how well a web page ranks, so adding your keywords here and nowhere else won't help you at all.

Each section of your web page carries a different weight in the overall ranking process. In the next section you will learn the parts of your web pages that require special attention. Focus on 2-3 keywords for each web page.

In most cases a web page will only rank well for a few keywords - the one that search engines determine to be the most important for that page. If you run a travel portal you cannot expect to rank well for the thousands of travel related keywords people are using, if you only optimize your front page. Instead, you have to optimize each of the web pages on your website that have content people are looking for - the keywords you have developed through your research.

TIP:
If you are using PositionPro to analyze your website, you will see two important numbers in the reporting you get: "Word Count" and "Index Value." Index value is the number that shows which keywords on each of your web pages are most important. PositionPro uses a specially developed algorithm that mimics how most search engines rank web pages.

It is highly recommend that you use this tool to obtain a good indication of what your most important keywords are. If the keywords you want to rank well for are not found in this report, it may be because they are insufficiently concentrated throughout the important components of the page.

Important places to use your keywords

Search engines weigh keywords according to their placement on a web page. There are some spots that are more important than others - places where you should always remember to use the most important keywords for each web page.

• Page titles
  The title of your page is the single most important place to have your keywords. Read more about how to write good title-tags here.
  
  
• Headlines
  Headlines carry more weight than the rest of the text on your pages. This is because text found in headings usually identifies a particular theme or section of content. The headlines have to be formatted using the HTML-tags <H1> to <H6> to be identified by search engines.
  
  
• Body copy
  Most people forget that this is the most obvious place a search engine looks for relevant content. You have to use the keywords in the main viewable text on your web page. This is what the users will actually see, whether human or machine. If the keywords are not on the viewable page, then they should probably not be in any other area of the Web page.
  
  
• Links
  The words that are hyper-linked on your web pages are sometimes weighed more heavily than the rest of the words in the main body text. So, if you want to rank well for "pet shop Boston" you should use that phrase as a hyperlink somewhere on your page.
  
  
• META-tags
  META tags should contain the keywords that appear on the page. As a general rule, if it is on the page then include it in the META-tags. However, the page will not rank well on their use alone. You can read more about META-tags in the next section
  
  
• ALT-texts
  The ALT-tag is also called "alternative text" and is used to describe images. You can see the text when you move your mouse over an image on a web page (that is, if they have added the ALT-tag). Some search engines read and index the text in ALT-tags but the weighting given varies from engine to engine.

Always remember to only use keywords that are included on each of your web pages.

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