SEO: HOW TO USE KEYWORDS

Posted by jake on 13th February, 2010 ·

: Image via Wikipedia

Keywords are the key in SEO. One most important and often overlooked areas is in the URL. Your URL must reflect what your business is about. For instance if you look at mine Localmarketingresearch.com you know it’s about marketing in Tucson. Next, choose keywords that target the inside of your audience thoughts, feelings and WORDS. Are they just doing research. If so, then you are going to want to target broad terms: trees, dogs, vacations. If they have decided on a particular brand you are going to go after more specific keywords like oak, German Shepherd, Jamaica. And if they are at the buying stage then you might will will target even more specific keyword phrases: planting oaks, German Shepherd for Sale or Montego Bay Specials.

Next you have to get inside your customers heads: interview, poll, brainstorm, and look at your competitors sites and stores. Now comes decision time as by now you will have hundreds if not thousands of keywords and phrases. You are ready to go to some of the online tools and prioritize and organize your plan of attack. Some free tools include Google Keyword Tool, Insights, Ad Planner, Freekeywords, and Wordtracker.com and among the better paid tools I would list the upgraded Wordtracker.com KeywordDiscovery.com, SEMrush.com and Samurai.com.

You then want to organize your keywords in a spread sheet according to category with three main sections being: popularity, competition and most important relevance to your audience. Simply put the object is to determine what phrases are popular and what keyword phrases are not.

So you have your list. Now what? Where do you need to seed these words:
Title tags
Headings
Paragraphs titles
Body Copy
Anchor Text in Links
URL
Image alt text
Meta Description

Some important things to keep in mind in regards to title tags. The most important tag should be to the left. You should use 8-10 words and no more than 65 characters. Be very specific on each page and focus on no more than 1-2 keyword phrases. Last but not least each page should have a unique title tag and meta description. A title tag tells the reader and the search engine what the page is about.

So what is a good example of a title tag.

Not: ABC Company
Not: widgets, steel, good, cheap, Chicago
Yes: ABC Company makes good cheap steel in Chicago

Another thing to remember is that anything can be searched it can be optimized and so on your site utilize amongst other resources:

Google
Flickr
Twitter
Digg
Technorati
Delicious
Youtube

In other words use your text, office docs, images, videos, blog, RSS feed, Media coverage and social news and bookmarks to broadcast, promote and distribute. To summarize: Research customer driven phrases and create a keyword glossary. Know what phase the search online is in when they go to the search engines. Next, use phrases in the titles, URLs, body copy, image alt text, links and navigation. And finally, extend keyword SEO to digital assets that are on page and social media off page. Hope this helps.