Article 4Keyword Placement

A Library of Articles by Experts in The Field of Search Engine Positioning

After You've Chosen your Keywords,
Where on Earth do you put Them?

By Robin Nobles,
Director of Training
www.academywebspecialists.com

You've spent a considerable amount of time choosing the right keywords for each important page of your site. You've gone to a search engine and searched for those keywords to see how much competition you have, and you've taken it one crucial step further by using WordTracker to discover what people are really searching for. Thanks to WordTracker, you now have some highly effective, well-used keywords that are sure to increase your traffic.

But where on earth do you put those keywords? Can't you just slap up a few META tags containing your keywords and be done with it?

Not hardly!

Before we look at exact spots where you can place your keywords, let's spend a few minutes learning how the engines determine the relevancy of a web page.

When a search engine visits your site, it's looking at the "skeleton view" of the page, not the fancy and well-designed website that viewers see. Instead, the engines see the source code, or HTML, of a page.

To give you an idea of what the engines see, open your browser and go to any web page. If you're using Netscape, click on View, then Page Source. If you're using Internet Explorer, click on View, then Source.

You're now viewing the skeleton of the page, which we'll call the source code.

When an engine visits your site, it sees this HTML, or source code. The engines consider anything that's toward the top of the page to be more relevant than anything further down on the page. Therefore, the <head> section of your web page, which is at the very top of the page, is extremely important in terms of relevancy, as well as the fact that the <title> tag and META description tag are used in the search results for most engines.

So, be sure to place your keywords toward the top of the page, in the beginning of your keyword-containing tags, and in the beginning of your body text.

Many other factors come into play when determining relevancy, including the keyword weight of the page, how popular the website is in terms of link popularity, how frequently the keywords are used, how close to the root domain the page is, and so forth. However, for this article, we're concentrating on where we can place our all-important keywords.

Before we get started on some ideas of where you can include your keywords, here are a couple of points to keep in mind:

	Every engine has a different ranking algorithm, which simply means that they each consider different things important or not important when determining relevancy and ranking. Therefore, what works for one engine won' t necessarily work for another.
	The engines like simplicity! You'll have much more success with your web page if you're not utilizing techniques like frames, JavaScript, dynamic pages, graphic-intense pages, etc.
	Because the engines like simplicity, don't approach search engine positioning like the proverbial "bull in a china closet." Instead, take it slowly. Don't utilize every one of these techniques on your page. Instead, start with a few, remembering that the tags toward the top of the page are most important. If you need boosts in relevancy, then add a few more tags to see how that helps.
	In most cases, you won't be able to optimize each page for more than one or two keywords. So, don't think that you'll be able to optimize your main page for 14 different keyword phrases. It just won't work! Fine tune each page for one or two keyword phrases only, and you'll be much more successful.
	The options below are a general listing of where you can place keywords, but again, it depends on the individual search engine whether the techniques will work or not. Also, things change so fast in this industry, which means that what works today may not work tomorrow.

Options of Where you can Include Keywords

Keywords in the <TITLE> tag

Example:

<TITLE>Educational children's software</TITLE>

Keywords in the <meta name="description"> tag

Example:

Note: All META tags should go in the <head></head> section of your page.

Keywords in the <meta name="keyword"> tag

Example:

Remember that sticking in a bunch of keywords in the keyword META tag won 't get your page ranked high for all of those keywords. In order to get a top ranking with a keyword phrase, you have to use that phrase throughout your page, in your title tag, and in other tags as well.

Keywords in the <meta http-equiv="keywords"> tag

Example:

A few of the engines, including AltaVista, consider the content of http-equiv keyword tags for relevancy. GO/InfoSeek does not.

Keywords in the heading tags (h2, h3, etc.) tag

Example:

<h3 ALIGN="CENTER">Educational Children's Software is Fun!</h3>

Many of the engines place considerable relevancy on heading tags, so use them frequently, especially toward the top of your page. You may also want to try putting your entire body text in a small heading tag.

Keywords in the link text

Example:

<A HREF=http://yourwebsite.com/keyword-phrase.htm>Click here for more educational children's software programs.</A>

Note: When you put your keyword phrases in your URLs, be sure to separate those phrases with a "-" or a "_" instead of running the keywords together. By breaking the words up in some way, the engines will see them as individual words in a phrase. If the words are not broken up, the spiders will see the words as a single term.

Example:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/web-optimizing-techniques.htm
(which you should do)

vs.

http://www.yourwebsite.com/weboptimizingtechniques.htm
(which you should not do)