SEO Made Simple | Where Do SEO Keywords Belong On A Website?
Welcome to the third installment of the SEO Made Simple Series. If this is the first post you’re reading in the series, welcome!
This is a five-part series intended for SEO beginners who want to learn enough about the basics of SEO to get started without getting overwhelmed.
In the previous installment of the series, I covered the basics of keywords. What they are, the types of keywords, and some tools available to help you do your keyword research.
If you're still new to understanding SEO keywords and you haven't had a chance to watch or read that yet, be sure to check that out first because, in this installment, I’m going over what to do with those keywords once you’ve figured out which ones you're going to target.
Where do you put them on your website to maximize your SEO optimization strategy?
Because this series of blog posts is based on a video series, they are a little different. They are basically ‘show notes’ of the videos. Lightly edited transcriptions of the video that you can refer to if you prefer reading or want a written resource for backup!
With that in mind, here’s where to use your SEO keywords on your website!
Title Tags
You want to include your SEO keywords in your title or title tags. You'll sometimes see it called ‘SEO title,’ depending on your platform.
This is where you incorporate your primary keywords in the title of each of your web pages or blog posts. The tag should describe the content of the page and be compelling. You want people to want to click on it. The current guidelines are to keep that title length within 50 to 60 characters.
Otherwise, you risk getting your title truncated in the Google search results.
Meta Descriptions
Next are meta or SEO descriptions. These descriptions appear in the Google search results once you've typed in a query.
You'll have the title appear, and then a short description below it is your meta or SEO description.
You want to be sure to include your keyword or keywords in this description. Its purpose is to provide a brief and compelling summary of what is in the article or in the web page.
The current guidelines for the meta descriptions are to keep them within 150 to 160 characters. This seems pretty short, and it is.
So, you should be concise and use your keywords wisely. The 150 to 160 character count is really because so many searches and results are being shown on mobile devices now that they're keeping them much shorter.
However, you want to make sure you realize that some platforms (and Squarespace is one of them) allow you to put in a longer description. But again, keep in mind that anything above that 160 character count risks being truncated in the search results. So make sure that you keep the most important keywords and information at 160 characters maximum.
Header Tags
Next, we have header tags. You'll also see these referred to as H1, H2, H3.
Remember back in English class in high school when we were taught to outline our essays?
You had your title, and then your subtitles, and then sub-headings, and from there, the body of your content.
This is what the header tags do. They create that outline structure for your web page and blog post content.
You want to use your keywords in the header tags to help structure your content because this helps the search engines understand the structure of your content and its context.
The H1 tag is a very important tag, and you want to have one H1 on each page or each blog post, but you don't want to have more than one. That can have a negative impact on your SEO.
Think of the H1 as the title of your page. And you want to keep that around 5 to 12 words. The H2 and H3, and on down if you have H4 and so on, can be used for the subheadings within your content.
This will help structure your content and give it an order that search engines will understand.
Of course, you want to utilize keywords there, too!
This is a good opportunity to use some of those related keywords or variations on your main keyword to help structure that data.
Body Content
Following, or below, your headings is the body of your content. These are the places where you're using your main paragraph font.
This is where you want to work on naturally incorporating your keywords into the body of your page copy or into the body of your blog post or article.
Now, this can take a bit of practice because you don't want to stuff keywords, and you don't want to keep repeating the same thing over and over again.
It takes a little practice to work it in to become a more natural flow.
And that's the thing you do want to focus on!
You want your content to be useful, readable, and valuable.
You don't want it to seem forced. So, don't stuff keywords.
For example, when you were a kid, and you tried to write an essay and say,
‘I'm very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very excited to go to the beach and visit my grandparents. It's going to be really, really, really, really, really, really fun.’
It's not readable, it's not valuable, and it's stuffing the words just to create length.
Avoid trying to do that with your keywords. Sprinkle them throughout your content around every 150 words or so if you can, and make them flow naturally.
Use variations, and remember that you also have related keywords to fall back on. Even if it's not exact, variations can be really helpful.
Focus on the quality of your content and the flow of your content, and don't try to get too caught up in making sure that you've got keywords constantly throughout.
Sprinkle them through, make it as natural a flow as possible, and remember it takes practice!
URLs
When you're creating URLs for your web pages, include keywords there, too, if possible.
It might not be possible on every page, but where you can, this can be a really helpful way to show the structure of your page and your website again. Anywhere you can put a keyword that's relevant to the page can be beneficial.
And this is the slug we’re talking about. So after "yourdomain.com/," we're talking about after the slug here. Keep it to four to six words maximum.
This is really helpful, especially when you're doing blog posts or articles, where you can include portions of the title or use your keywords.
That will look favorably as well to the search engines because, again, you're giving them more context and clues about the structure and content of what's on that page.
Images
Alt-Text
With images, one of the most important things you can do images is include alt text. Alt text is where you can use your descriptive keywords to describe the image.
This is helpful for the search engines to not only understand the content of what's in the image but it also helps improve the accessibility for users who are visually impaired or using a screen reader.
So, the combination of giving context to the image (because Google can search images) as well as having it more accessible to readers are both looked upon favorably by the search engines from an SEO perspective.
Remember, sometimes, in a Google search, you'll get images that pop up, so if you use alt text, that's another way that your content can be served in the Google search results.
An example would be, let's return to our yoga studio example…
Say you have an image of one of your yoga classes in your studio on your services page.
The alt text on that image could be something like "Students taking a hot vinyasa yoga class in our studio in Boston." You've given a concise, clear description. Somebody who's using a reader can understand what that image is about, but you've also used the keywords of the type of class and your location within that alt text.
File Names
Another thing to think about with images is the file name of your images. It's another opportunity, where applicable, to use keywords.
Instead of uploading an image with a nonsensical or irrelevant file name like image45678. jpg, create a file name that's relevant to the image.
So, it could be Hot Vinyasa Yoga Studio. jpg or .png. It's another opportunity for you to use your keywords in the file name because they can see that as well.
It is also really helpful when you go back and need to figure out what images you have used to have them have a title that makes sense and makes them a lot easier to find later on.
That file naming tip is also useful for any other types of files you may have on your website as well. So, if you have some downloadable PDFs or videos or things like that, always look at those as opportunities to use your keywords in the file names.
Just remember, it needs to be relevant. The search engines will be able to tell if you are creating an image or a file and naming it something or using alt text that absolutely is completely unrelated to the context of the image or the file.
Internal and External Linking
Next, let's talk about Linking.
Internal linking is when you place links from one page of your website to a piece of content or another page within your website.
There’s also an opportunity here to use keywords in the anchor text of these links.
For example, if you're linking to another relevant blog post on your website, instead of,
"If you found this topic interesting, check out this blog post,"
and just have ‘this blog post’ linked to the blog post you want to send them to...instead, use keywords or the actual title of that blog post, in that text to the link.
The key is to make it relevant instead of generic because this sends another signal to the search engines about the content and context of the page and where it's going, and that will help you from an SEO perspective.
When it comes to external linking, when you're going to be linking off your site, keywords can be relevant, but it is important to remember to set those links up to open in a separate tab.
This is because if you click on a link to an external source and it just opens within the same window, you've now taken those people completely off your website.
Your website window is now closed, and SEO traffic is now traveling to this external site.
However, if you open it up in a new tab, your website stays open on their computer on one tab, and the new content is open on a separate tab, so you retain your SEO traffic.
Footer
Finally, the footer of your website is another great place to make sure you are taking advantage of some of your keywords.
If you remember, we talked about local SEO in our first installment of this series. If you have a brick-and-mortar location, or even if you are virtual and want to attract local traffic, including information about your location is ideal throughout your page copy and in your footer.
Using keywords related to that can also be extremely helpful, whether that be an address or general location information. The search engines will be able to see your local information and hopefully will start serving your website up in the results for people searching for you locally.
As you can see, there are many opportunities within your website, the pages, and their content to integrate your keywords as a part of your SEO strategy.
Coming up next in this series...
Coming up in the next in this series is a video and article for my fellow Squarespace users.
I'm going to show you exactly where and how to set up all of these things I mentioned on your Squarespace website. So be sure you don't miss that one if you're a Squarespace user!
If you found this helpful, be sure not to miss the rest of this series and future topics! Subscribe to my channel or my email list so you’ll be the first to know when new videos/articles are published!
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