Keyword Usage and Placement for SEO
Keyword usage and placement is an art and a science especially if you’re competing in a highly competitive market such as mortgages or insurance. There are basic best practices that need to be adhered to in order to give your site an edge over your competition. Here is a quick guide on how and where to place your keywords:
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At least once in title tag, maybe twice, but not consecutively.
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At least twice in the meta description tag - this also helps improve click through rate (CTR)
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In the <H1> heading tag of the page (located at the top), this is also good for usability as it confirms to the user what the page is about.
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Once or twice in bold, underline and/or italicised.
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4 to six times in your document’s body text, but make sure it makes sense to your users.
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In the alt tag of an image, this is a great way to optimise your image for image search and get some extra traffic from image search, this is part of optimising for universal search.
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DO NOT place your keyword in external link anchor text
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DO NOT place your keyword in internal link anchor text unless that link is pointing to a more specific kw phrase that includes the target term, like “loans” in anchor text for “cheap loans”
If you follow the above guidelines you’ll be well on your way to ranking highly in the search results pages. The challenge now is to get other sites to link to your site using your target keywords!
Good luck!
