After being the focal point of website structure for years, keywords have lost their luster over the past year. It is true most search engines do not use the keyword meta tag for search ranking purposes. Google recently posted in their blog, “Our web search disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.”
But if you ignore keywords you are making a huge mistake. If you want to increase your online visibility than keywords are still very mportant!
Most search engines may disregard the keyword metatag but establishing 6 to 10 keywords (per page) is extremely important. The following is a list of why it is still important to spend plenty of time in determining your keywords for each landing page on your website.
Page title and description - Search engines certainly pay attention to your meta title and description so including keywords in your page title and description is vital. Don’t go over board as you want to keep your page title to 70 characters or less (Google displays up to 66 characters). Also, your page title is the hyperlink from the SERP (search engine results page) to your website so make sure it captives your audience. The description is maybe the second most important element for search engine placement. Again, try to include some of your keywords but avoid repeating what is in your title. - Content- Keyword placement throughout your content is another good SEO strategy. Most search engines give preference to the first 300 to 600 words of each page so make sure you include your keywords within these parameters. Don’t go overboard but including a nice list of your keywords in your content is a good strategy. To check the frequency of words on a page use this keyword frequency tool.
- Headings – Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can provide the same feature. Headings not only help human readers read the content but they also help search engine spiders better identify and understand content on a page. Because of their importance, including keywords in the headings is a good idea. Don’t saturate your headings with keywords as you want to keep the headlines between 2 and 22 words for optimum visibility and search results. Google results will only display the first 63 characters of each headline so keep that in mind.
- Images – Images are certainly a great way to enhance a website but it is important to note that search engine crawlers cannot ‘see’ images. If you have an image that contains important text, this content will not be seen by crawlers. You can address this issue by using the ‘alt’ attribute. The alt attribute allows web pages to assign text to the image. This helps search engine crawlers identify the image. The alt attribute is another opportunity to use a keyword or phrase.
- URL structure – The URL structure, along with your title tags and meta descriptions should all work together to help you with search engine visibility and rankings. Just like your title tags and meta descriptions your URLs are also all going to be unique. A URL such as www.example.com/recipes/detail.aspx?ID=34234 is an example of a poor URL structure. Compare this to a URL of www.example.com/recipes/how-to-make-lasagna.com. This URL is clean and targets specific keywords that are also included in the page content, headings and other important meta information.
- Viral marketing campaign – Establishing 6 to 10 keywords is vital not only for on-site purposes but off-site purposes as well. Viral marketing, also known as word-of-mouth marketing, is the development of valuable content (new release, article, ebook, video, podcast, etc.) that is spread to others. Using your keywords as the focus of your viral marketing campaign helps reinforce your relationship to those words and ranking within search engines. Here is a blog post by fushionfoot.com on the Three Steps to Article Marketing. The post talks about the importance of keywords in article marketing which is one form of viral marketing. There are some other good tips as well.
- Social media sites/blogs – The right keywords are not only important for your website and a viral marketing campaign but they are important in the success of your social media marketing programs. Search engines are increasingly indexing the social media tools such as blogs, micro-blogging sites like Twitter plus site profiles, discussions and forums. The purpose of keywords in social networking is to gain the attention of fellow users on a topic which is of interest to them. This is where your keyword analysis and structure comes into play with social media sites. Social media expert Joel Comm talks about the importance of keywords in one of the most powerful social media sites – Twitter.
To truly maximize your online visibility you need to establish 6 to 10 keywords (per landing page). A good starting point is your home page as for most companies this will be your primary landing page. As you grow and understand search engine optimization you can expand your landing pages which allows you to expand your total keywords. So yes most search engines don’t regard the keyword metatag in search engine results but they certainly can have a major impact on all on-site and off-site activities.
Please share your thoughts on the importance of keywords. I am sure there are other applications and uses of keywords, both on-site and off-site, that I did not include. I look forward to finding out from others additional ways to use keywords to increase online visibility.
