Promoting Your Keywords

Effective Keyword Promotion for Search Engine Optimization

Keywords are words and word combinations that surfers use in order to search, via a search engine, for websites that will give them relevant information in which they are interested.

How do the search engines identify and track keywords?

Clarity – the keyword to be promoted needs to appear a number of times on the page, so that the search engine can understand that this is the topic of the page. Write for humans – if a human reader would be able to figure out easily what the topic of your page is, so will the search engine. In general, it is not practical to promote more than 2 or 3 keywords per page.

Placement – The words should be spread throughout the content. The first keyword should appear at the head of the page, preferably within the first 50-100 words of the HTML code.

Tags – It is recommended that your keywords appear in the title tag and, less importantly, the description meta-tag.  The keyword should be as close to the beginning of the tag as possible.

Primary and Secondary Headers – the keyword should appear in headers labeled with the H1 and H2 tags.

Emphasis – the search engines are more likely to pay attention to emphasized words labeled with the B and STRONG tags (bold) or the I tag (italics) .

Appearance in Internal Links and Backlinks – the promoted keyword should appear as part of the link text in internal and external links leading onto the page, as well as link anchor text on the page itself.

Domain and URL Names – if possible, the domain name should contain the keyword for promotion. For example: www.cars.com. URLs should be relevant to the subject matter,with the words separated by hyphens. (In the domain name, however, there should preferably be no hyphens.) That said, do note that it is not recommended to change an existing URL just for the sake of website promotion, because there can be negative effects to a URL change.

Proximity of Words – Make sure that there is appropriate spacing between keyword appearances. If the keyword appears several times very close together, Google is likely to consider the page as having been manipulated.

Conjugations – It is recommended to use different conjugations of the promoted keyword in the text.

Typos – Take advantage of common typos for leverage in the Google rankings. A user who searches for a keyword with an accidental typo (and this happens quite often) will see among the top results the page on which the typo is used as a keyword. Promotion of a page with a typo is likely to be relatively easy because there are not many competitors, however, don’t overdo this technique! Due to Google’s “do you mean” function, which suggests to searchers that they might have searched with a typo and provides them with an option to research for the corrected term, this technique is losing value.

Appearance in Additional Pages from Same Website – the keyword should appear in as many pages as possible on the same site. On small sites, it is recommended to choose one or two keywords for the entire site as the starting phase. Only after the desired result has been achieved should promotion of additional keywords be attempted.

Names of Files – the search engine pays attention to names of files and folders. Have them contain the desired keyword for promotion.

Tables - the search engine spider scans tables on a page from left to right and then from top to bottom. Enter the contents according to order of importance, the most important content displayed in the first table that the spider scans and the least important content in the last table that the spider scans.

Images

The spiders are still unable to analyze images, but they can learn from them in several ways:

  • Use of Alternate Text – use of the keyword in the alt or title tag for images
  • Placement – the placement of the image in relation to the text
  • Names - use the keyword in the file name of the image
  • Size – the visible size of the image shows its importance (e.g. a small picture will be interpreted as of little importance)
  • Amount – the number of images that appears on a page can provide indications (e.g. maybe they all deal with the same topic?)
  • Background - background images are problematic because you cannot add alt tags to them. The search engine can learn nothing from them