Search engine optimisation (SEO) is essential to the success of most websites out there. It covers a wide variety of different practices, all aimed at one noble goal: ranking in search engines.
One key part of SEO is the implementation of keywords in your website. It’s especially important if your business exclusively relies on organic search results and doesn’t use any paid advertising.
Still, keywords aren’t something that you simply throw in every corner of your website and hope for the best. Their usage is rather regulated and methodical if you hope for any positive results.
And in order to help you with this, we’ve put together this article where we’ll discuss what to do and what not to do when adding keywords to your website. We’ll also discuss the many different places where you can insert keywords on your website.
We hope that with this article, you can improve the overall state of your SEO through more thorough and efficient implementation of keywords. Without further ado, here’s how to add keywords to a website for SEO!
Keywords and SEO
Before we get into more detail, let’s first discuss the relationship between keywords and search engine optimisation. SEO refers to the process of optimising your web pages so that they can rank better in search results pages (SERPs).
A big part of the SEO process is using keywords. These are words and phrases that best describe your content. The world’s biggest search engine, Google, uses keywords to determine which content is relevant to a particular search query.
It also uses that information to determine how well a page should rank in searches for a particular term. Indeed, without keywords, Google cannot figure out what category your website belongs to. This means it will fail to show it to the people you are trying to reach.
Think of a website and its pages as numerous academic papers. Now, for a paper to be considered well written, it needs a thesis and supporting arguments that relate to the said thesis. This helps readers of the paper to have a clear understanding of what the subject is and what the paper is about.
Google thinks the same way. For them, a well-made website is one that has the main subject and comes with sub-categories that relate to that main subject. Keywords act as a tool for search engines to get a clear picture of whether you did this or not.
For instance, your main subject might be “phones”, which makes your sub-categories “phone cases”, “iPhones”, “Android”, “new phone”, etc.
Picking the right keywords for your website
Now that you understand how the implementation of keywords is essential to a website, it’s time to choose which to use. Now, for this process, you’re going to rely on a number of tools, some free and some paid.
Our focus today is going to be on the most common free tool out there, the Google Keyword Planner. To use this tool, simply input your location information and category, then type in the main subject of your website.
The tool will then generate a number of keywords for you with numerous filters, but we’ll focus on two:
- Competition: This can be Low, Med, or High. It tells you how many people (or businesses) are trying to use that same word or phrase. Of course, the higher the competition is, the more difficult it will be for you to rank high in Google for that search query. For small businesses, it’s generally recommended to filter for medium to low difficulty.
- Average Monthly Searches: This will filter keywords for you based on their average monthly searches (for selected dates). Keywords that exceed a 10,000 average monthly search volume are usually considered difficult to compete for.
As we’ve mentioned above, using the Google Keyword Planner isn’t necessarily a complete way of doing keyword research. There are free and paid tools out there that can do a better job at this. They include Moz, Semrush, Ahrefs, Soovle, and more.
The process of keyword research is also more thorough than what we have just mentioned, but that’s a topic for another day.
How to add keywords to your website for SEO – 7 places
Meta title tag
Similar to a meta description, this title tag is the name of the page that users will see if they find you on search engine results pages (SERPs). This title will be clickable and will take the user directly to your page.
Most desktop and mobile devices are able to show anywhere between 50 and 60 characters for a title tag. So, it’s recommended to stick to that length. And one of the most effective ways to do this is to just type in your primary keyword followed by your company name or vice-versa.
Optimising your meta title tag and its description should also be done for your homepage and any “services” or “products” page you have.
Meta descriptions
Although one of the most basic ways to add keywords for SEO, meta descriptions are often overlooked.
This 160 character paragraph act as a simple summary to describe what the content of your web page is about. This description is what shows up under a page name and URL when people do a search.
Unsurprisingly, placing your keyword in this summary helps Google to better filter your results. It’s also an effective way to get one or two crucial keywords attached to the part of your page that gets served up by search engines.
Of course, you would want your meta descriptions to be optimised for both SEO and readability. There are numerous tools out there that can help you with this. Additionally, since the meta description is only 160 characters, make sure to use the keyword at least once but no more than twice.
Lastly, if you manage to smoothly add a secondary keyword in your meta description alongside your primary one, you’re very much good to go!
How to add keywords to a website for SEO: Article title
It’s recommended to put your main keyword in the title of your content if feasible. Google tends to pair your title header with your meta description in order to get a better picture of what your content is about. And having your keyword in there will, of course, be of great help.
However, if you feel like you can’t use your keyword naturally in the title, then you can simply result in a variation of it. Just as long as you get the same point across, you’re good to go.
Content introduction
Numerous SEO experts believe that Google tends to care more about the first 200 words in your content. This is because in those first 100 to 200 words, a content writer will set up an introduction of what will be discussed.
It’s only logical for Google to focus on this since most readers will decide whether to continue reading or not based on the introduction.
Still, it’s important to take note of how you can utilise your keywords in an article introduction. For starters, you want to try to put the primary keyword within the first sentence or paragraph of the introduction. This, of course, needs to be done in a way as to not sacrifice the quality of the content.
You could also use one secondary keyword in the first 200 words, but not too close to the primary one, of course. This order kind of applies to all the corners of your website. Your primary keyword resides in all the most important places, followed by your secondary keywords and any other additional keywords.
How to add keywords to a website for SEO: Content
We live in a somewhat SEO-centred digital world which leads numerous businesses to neglect the importance of the reader. Indeed, your reader’s ability to be engaged and informed by your content should never be compromised because of bad keyword placement.
One way of making your keywords sound more natural in your content is using stop words. These are extremely common words that most search engines ignore. In other words, they can be used to create a seamless reading experience whenever a keyword is encountered.
For example, let’s say you’re trying to target the phrase “restaurant Liverpool”. Now, there is no way that you can put this phrase in your content without it looking like a blatant keyword insertion. Adding a stop word to the phrase can be quite helpful. Now, it would read “restaurant in Liverpool”.
Here’s a list of the different SEO stop words that you can use.
Now, the question is, how many keywords should you include in your content? It depends mainly on the type of keywords you’re dealing with and the length of your content.
The general rule of them is to include your primary keyword about once every 100 to 150 words. So, for example, if your article is around 2000 words, inserting the primary keyword anywhere between 14 and 20 times would be appropriate.
Of course, it’s recommended to spread those instances as far away from each other as possible. Or else, your content might feel forced and unnatural in the eyes of search engines and the average reader.
Headings
Headings are a formatting tool found in most text editors out there. It helps you to break up your text into clear sections. They are a must-have in every website for the sake of both SEO and general readability.
These headings also have distinct HTML tags (for H1, H2, H3, etc.), which help Google to know what’s most important in your content. Using a keyword in these headings can bring more emphasis to both the meaning and importance of the keyword.
URL
Last but not least, you could add your primary keyword to the article’s main page URL. Assuming you have already used your primary keyword in the title of your article, it should be in the URL automatically.
However, if the title of your article is similar to the main keyword but doesn’t include all of it, then you should tweak your page URL accordingly.
There has been a heated debate amongst marketers on whether or not it’s necessary to even do this. And based on our own experience, we recommend that you do this regardless. At the end of the day, you have nothing to lose.
Feeling overwhelmed? We can help
SEO can feel overwhelming for beginners. Thankfully, you don’t have to do it alone. If you feel like you can use some help with search engine optimisation, get in touch with us today. One of our experts will contact you shortly to explain how we can help.
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