Kev Price SEO

I have found keywords a highly misunderstood topic.

Even now I hear SEOs talking about keyword density and meta tags, people still ask questions about why we are not placing keywords in white text on a white background.

Keywords are an extremely important part of SEO, however their use has changed considerably over the years.

No longer do we need to get an optimum keyword density, meta-tags have gone the way of the dodo and keyword stuffing will get you penalized in the SERPs.

Keywords become integral to your information architecture and conversion strategy.

They should be niched and targeted.

How to develop a keyword strategy

The initial stages of keyword research involve brainstorming words or combinations of words that that are relevant to your site and your target audience. Its usually pointless targeting the big general terms unless you have a big general service to back it up.

Websites are all about conversions, to targeting terms that will drive the traffic to your site who actually want what you are providing will keep them on the site and get them converting to your goals.

An example of this is a site I created for my parents many years ago. I targeted ‘benal beach apartments‘ as my keywords and the conversion rate of visitor to inquiry is around 65% which is with hardly any modern optimization strategies at all.
Using tools such as Overture will give you a general idea of which keywords generate more traffic than others and are more competitive.

Once you have a list you can use the SERPs to analyze who you are competing with for those search terms and how strong they are. Sites such as Yahoo!’s Site Explorer can give you a good idea of your competitors link strength. It can also give you ideas as to where to gather your links from.

After you have your final list of keywords you can begin working them into your information architecture. With broad terms higher up in your sitemap, semantically linking to the wider terms in secondary levels of navigation and long tail terms in tertiary navigation.

I’ll write an article on information architecture soon as its a large subject in itself.

So you have your keywords and your archecture, what do you do with them?

First of all, if you don’t yet have a domain name, I would look at getting one that contains your keywords. This my primary position for keywords as many links to your page will use your domain name as anchor text. More on that later.

If you do have your domain name the next position to have your keywords are in the title of the page.

The title of the page should be engaging rather than keyword stuffed.

The title is what is going to appear in the SERPs with the searched for words bolded.

The only other places I would pay specific attention too on your site when it comes to keywords are the url of the page (e.g. this page is kevprice.com/seo/keywords ) and the h1 tag of the page. Which should be very similar to the title tag without the branding of the site.

So far we have a domain name, an engaging title tag and therefore an engaging headline tag, plus well written URLs.

Beyond that keywords should not be focused upon. Copy on the page should be written naturally on the theme of the page. Every survey out there shows that internet users make decisions based on quality of content and the search engines have enough semantic knowledge to understand the relationships between words on a page.
Google and the major search engines measure this quality and authority on a topic by how many people are talking about you (i.e. linking to your site)

This is the most important place to get your keywords. If your keyword appears in anchor text on someone else’s site, then the search engines read this as the person saying that you are an authority on that subject. This is democratic, much more difficult to manipulate and seen to be less biased (unlike meta tags which are self written and so seen to be very biased).

This is the reason I see the domain name to be the most important place to have your keywords. people are highly likely to link to your site using your domain name, which means you get your keywords directly in the anchor text.

Anchor text keywords are not the be all and end all of SEO. Google also analyze the page the link is coming from, the text surrounding the link, the theme and community of the page the link is on and the possible reasons for linking (editorial, reciprocal, paid for etc.) before assigning a value to the link.

Summary

Keywords describe the theme of the page and should be relevant to the theme and topic of the site and community.

The words should be placed on the page within positions that are beneficial to the visitor, telling them what to expect on the page. (title, headline, url).

Your content should be engaging enough to generate interest in your site so that people will talk about you using relevant language to your keywords.

Using keywords in this way will allow search engines to understand what the page is about and send a highly relevant audience to you that can be converted to meet your goals.