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Any SEO firm will tell you that keyword research and identification is a major factor in their optimization strategies; that much is a no brainer. But knowing where to place those keywords can be a little trickier. Here are some tips you can use to help you know where to place keywords and phrases in your webpage:

Title Tags:
The title tag is a great place to add your targeted keywords. The text inside the title tag displays as your page’s title in the search engines’ results. The title tag should be no more than 6 or 7 words, with the keywords appearing at the beginning of the tag. If your title is any longer, the level of Keyword Density drops (so the words become less important to the SERPS).

Anchor Text:
Anchor text links are ranked as very valuable to search engines, so plenty of them should be in your web pages. The most powerful anchor texts of all are those whose text contains targeted keywords.  Each click on an inbound keyword anchor link will count as a vote of that keyword to a search engine’s rankings. There’s a whole article on Anchor Text Optimisation available in the archives.

Heading Tags:
Adding keywords in heading tags (H1, H2 and H3) is as beneficial as putting them in the page title. Do not use words like “and”, “for”, “the”, etc. as they are ignored by search engine spiders. Try to make best possible use of this place in your website.

URL:
Including targeted keywords in your website’s URL is helpful from an SEO perspective. Also be sure to use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URL to separate text. As with title tags, the more words you have, the less “strength” or weight they will have with the search engines.

Meta Tags:
Although Meta tags are no longer recognized by Google, they are still helpful for other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. If you are optimizing for other search engines, it’s a good idea to place some keywords in Meta tags. If you would like to read more on meta tags, there’s a list of meta tags and also an article on the myths of SEO and meta tags.

Alt Tags:
Search engine spiders are unable to read images or graphics. If you have images in your web pages, then make sure to include several top targeted keywords in the ALT tags. Be careful not to “stuff” the alt tags with too many keywords, however, or your rankings could be dropped.

Website Body:
Strategically “sprinkling” keywords throughout the body of your website is ideal. All pages should contain at least the top 2 keywords that you are targeting, and all articles and other content should be peppered with various targeted keywords as much as possible. Also note that the closer to the top of your page, the moreweight the search engines will add to them.

Using this short list to help you with your keyword placements will surely benefit your search engine rankings.

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Tags: Content Writing, Google, Meta Tags, Optmise, PageRank, SEO, Tags, Title Tags, Web Design

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 9:16 pm and is filed under SEO, Web Design. 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.