The Importance Of Keyword Placement
Now that you have your list of keywords, what do you do with them? Many online publishers who actually take the time to research their keywords, hastily throw together their content so they can get busy chasing backlinks. Big mistake! Having all the right keywords is important, but those keywords won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to use them.
There’s a lot more to keyword placement that just writing an article and stuffing your keywords in as many times as possible. Your on page SEO strategy is every bit as important as your backlinking campaign; and knowing a little bit about keyword placement can help you knock even the most heavily linked competitor out of that top Google position for at least a short time.
While the idea of keyword density is all but dead as a metric, you do need to put your keywords in the right places if you want to get big G’s attention. Recent search result studies have shown that using your main keyword more than 5-6 times in the body of a 500 word article adds little if any SEO value. While nobody knows the mind of Google, research has suggested that Google checks these key areas when they crawl your page:
- URL- Make sure you use your main keyword in the url of your page.
- Meta Description- A lot of people forget about this one. The meta description is what searchers will see on the result page, and having your main keyword in there just makes sense.
- Title- The main keyword of your article should always be in the title of your page; ideally right at the beginning of the title. If you’re writing about NASCAR drivers, “Life In The Fast Lane” is a witty title, but it’s not relevant to your keyword. Google will take much more notice of something like “NASCAR- Top 10 Drivers Of All Time.”
- Sub-headings- Using your main keyword in the level 2 and level3 headings on your page is the icing on the cake.
- Alt Attributes- Visitors love images, and Google seems to love seeing keywords in alt attributes. Putting an alt attribute with an image is often as simple as uploading a photo and adding a caption, and it lets readers find your page through an image search.
Correct Keyword Placement For Online Success
Even if you get everything else wrong, following these simple keyword placement rules can help you get to the top of the Google results. It’s not unheard of for a brand new page, with correct keyword placement, no backlinks and no Page Rank, to knock off a heavily linked PR 4 or 5 site, simply because the author followed these rules and the older site did not.
There are no guarantees in online publishing, and you should always research your competition before putting too much effort into your article. But following some basic on page SEO practices, including correct keyword placement, will help ensure that your website content climbs up through the search results as quickly as possible.
