The Maine SEO Blog

You’ll have to excuse me, I have a little Paula Cole stuck in my head…

I feel like I’m constantly talking about the art of keywords and keyword research, but never about where keywords should actually go.  So, put your keywords in the…

Page

• Title – put the best of the best here. Changing the title is the easiest way to increase your on-page search visibility.  It’s both at the top of the page (up near your maximize/minimize/close buttons) and the link to the page on the Search Engine Results.  Include your location if your business is local.
• Header – synonyms/alternative words used in the title – you really don’t want to use the term “cheap hotel” over and over on a page.  You could mix it up with “Affordable Inns” (if that’s what people are searching for, that is).
• Copy – duh. I can not emphasize enough that copy should both incorporate keywords, while also balancing your company’s tone and making the page informative.
• Navigation – make the links in the nav short, sweet, and keyword rich!
• Links – “Click here” really isn’t going to cut it. Incorporate keywords in the anchor text – as those words have a little more search power than regular words on the page.

Code

• Meta-description – or the “search engine description”.  It should be a good synopsis of the page, incorporating those keywords, as well as your location and contact information.
• Meta-keywords – Yahoo is the only one that pays attention to these, and it doesn’t hurt to use them.  Just be sure to keep it to 10 or 15 keywords and phrases, all specific to that particular page.
• Alt Tags - image descriptions can be a great way to acquire traffic from image searchers.

Web Marketing

• Blogging and Article Marketing – As every blogpost and article is a new page, it’s a great way to focus on a niche audience or a hot topic.  You can further optimize with categories and tags too.
• Video – Optimizing for video is becoming more important with universal search – YouTube offers great options for optimizing your videos.

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Tags: keywords, Optimization, SEO

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 9:17 am and is filed under Keyword Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.