Critical Places to Include Keywords
Posted by Yvette | Under Online Marketing, SEO Tuesday Nov 10, 2009
Many companies will spend countless hours researching and refining the perfect set of keywords for their business website. That’s a good thing, because keywords drive search. To put it plainly, keywords are the language of the Internet. Without them, we can’t tell search engines what we want. Without them, we can’t bring targeted prospects to our websites.
It does appear, however, that many people are only using their keywords in their content. Parenthetical keyword usage is important, but there are four other critical places where keywords really matter. Every website should be utilizing keywords in their title tags, meta tags, meta descriptions, and H1 tags. If these phrases sound like a foreign language, they should, because they’re HTML. However, what they represent are some very basic locations within your website where you can use your keywords for maximum effect.
First, let’s talk about title tags. Every page on your website has its own separate title called a title tag. Title tags appear in search results. For an example, check out the image at the beginning of this blog. They also appear in the top of your browser bar. If you’re using Microsoft Explorer to view this blog page, then you should see the phrase “SurchSquad Blog – PPC Management and SEO Services for Small Business.” That’s our title tag for our blog pages.
Meta tags are keywords that you can imbed in each of the pages on your website. They can’t be viewed by people reading your website, but they can be detected by search engines. These serve to tell the search engines what each of your webpages is about.
For an example of a meta description, take another look at the image above. Every page on your website should have its own meta description, since Google indexes every page separately. This means that when someone is searching for a company like yours on the Internet, the first page they find may or may not be your homepage. They might first land on your services or about us page. That’s why it’s critical to optimize every page on your website.
H1 tags are subheadings that separate your paragraphs. Subheadings are great because they break up your text and make your content easy to scan. Using keywords in your subheadings can allow the search engines, and your readers, to know what each section of your web page is going to be about.
Finding the best keywords for your business really is just the beginning. Knowing where to use them can be the key to getting dramatically better search results for your website.
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