Keyword SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a big mystery for most people because there are just scattered information about keyword SEO-ing everywhere around the web. Articles even dating back to 2003 on keyword SEO-ing. Today, I would like to take the mystery out of keyword SEO-ing and show you exactly how you can use it to your benefit of ranking well in the search engines. Before we start our lecture, I would like to first off direct readers who don’t already know how to find low competitive keyword SEO-able keywords at our article on Finding The Best Optimized Keywords For The Search Engines And Adsense. Obviously if you know how to find low competitive keywords to rank for, you can continue to read on.
First off, I would like to put some facts out there.
- Blog’s homepages are harder to rank for specific keywords because it is updated almost daily
- Websites that don’t update their homepage and have a fixed homepage have an advantage
Because blogs are almost updated frequently, it is better to keyword optimize posts because they have fixed content with fixed keywords that Google sees. (This doesn’t mean that optimizing and linking back to your homepage won’t help your site, it just means it is harder to rank for specific keywords) That is one advantage blogs have over fixed websites, they spit out more posts to be able to be better optimized on a lot more keywords than the average fixed website.
Things to Look For In Keyword SEO
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There is no one particular method to optimize a site’s page to better be ranked in the search engines. However, first we would like to talk about on-page methods you can do to help keyword optimize your pages and better improve your chances of ranking well in them.
On-page Optimization
- The Page Title <Title> - Having well defined page titles with the ideal keywords you want to rank for is very important in keyword SEO. Try to combine the keywords together as much as possible to get better results, this also applies within the body text. Titles with only about 3-6 words are preferred by search engines or some keywords might be “lost.”
- Headings <h1>, <h2> – Headings, even through they are tremendously ignored, carry tremendous weight in terms of keyword SEO. Probably due to it’s ugly size, it just isn’t acceptable in the webmasters world. (If you see some webmasters change their theme with large fonts, they are probably using headers as a way to better optimize for their keywords)
- Body Text - Repeating the keyword that you are trying to rank for in the post frequently can also help to keyword optimize your site for better chance of ranking well for the keyword. It is suggested that your most important keywords should be included in the introduction paragraph because that is generally where Google Bots takes the snippets of keywords. Don’t think about keyword stuffing your first paragraph because it can result in a search engine ranking penalty or in a worse case scenerio, a ban.
- Meta Tags – Although meta tags are practically useless in today’s mordern day search engines, it is important to have a feasible meta tag description. It can be the difference from just having a page view to a click. The only two meta tags that I believe you should even consider thinking about is the title meta tag and the description meta tag.
Although these on-page optimization tips may help improve your chances of ranking better for a certain keyword, it is important to still maintain a balance from writing contents readable for humans and not only just for SEO purposes.
Off-Page Optimization
- Link Building - Link building also known as backlinking, is an example of off-page optimization. The main criteria that you want to get out of this is feasible link backs that have links coming from anchors (Hyperlinked words linking back to your site) with keywords you are trying to rank for. The more backlinks you with the keyword as the anchor, the more closer you are to the top 10 for that keyword.
One thing that I would like to make very clear, is that whether it is a dofollow link or not, it has nothing to do with improving your page’s keyword SEO. Any link back with the keyword as an anchor link will benefit your chances of ranking higher for that keyword. Dofollow links and nofollow links are just terms that indicate whether or not it will pass any page rank juice to the links. Page rank juice has nothing to do with link building, but rather an indication as to how many quality sites linked back to you. (However, if you gets link backs from high authority sites, high page ranking site, it is more valuable in terms of keyword SEO than a linkback from a zero page rank site)
