How To Use Your Keywords

Let’s continue our step-by-step breakdown of SEO! Here’s your roadmap: Step 1: Find the right keywords, Step 2: Use your keywords and Step 3: Track what you’re doing. In this post, we’ll focus on using your keywords.

Remember that using keywords effectively allows them to increase rankings. First, look at your tagging. Ensure page tagging is engaging and encourages clicks to your website. Check your title tags, meta descriptions and main headings.

Title Tags

Title tags are HTML tags in the head section of each webpage, and should give readers a clue about the page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result. In addition, the title tag is displayed during social sharing. Because search engines, such as Google, look at your title tag to make sense of your page, your title tag is important. Check to make sure each of your pages has a title tag. 

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions or meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content. They don’t appear on the page, but are in the page’s source code and are also displayed in SERP. You’ll want to write unique meta descriptions in the tone of your site. Keep meta descriptions at around 160-165 characters maximum.

H1 Headings

Header tags are important for SEO because they communicate to the search engines what your website is about. Aim to incorporate relevant keywords into your h1 and h2 headings without being spammy. Think of these headings as a way to break up a text-heavy blog and help your readers skim the page to locate the information they need. 

Image Alt Tags

Alt tags are brief descriptions of the site images. Google uses these to index images, and they were originally designed to make web images accessible for people who are visually impaired. Screen readers use image alt tags to describe images. 

URL Optimization

You can include keywords in your web address in order to direct your target audience to your site. For example, instead of using about-us in your web address you would use about-lamomomaes-bakery.

Internal Linking

Linking internally helps Google recognize your site structure, linking structure and helps your user navigate your site and keep them engaged. 

XML Sitemap

Your sitemap is an overall listing of all the pages on your site. You give Google permission to crawl your site and use this information for searches. 

Avoid Duplication

Keep in mind that Google doesn’t like duplicate descriptions or title tags on your site. If you use a keyword excessively, the search engine perceives this as spamming. Also, you want to make sure each page on your site has unique keywords. You don’t want two pages on your site competing for the same keyword ranking. This is also known as keyword cannibalization, and as the name implies, it’s not good.  

How are you feeling about the SEO steps so far? It’s more manageable when it’s broken down into simpler steps. Next in the series is Step 3: Tracking SEO. If you have additional SEO questions or want a free SEO analysis, please contact Acquire Internet Marketing. We’d love to help!