Home » SEO » Strategies » Are you getting the maximum from your keywords?

We all know that keywords lay at the heart of search engine optimization strategies and hence identifying the right set of keywords is an important activity (and we have discussed this in detail in two other articles on keywords). But your job doesn’t end here; you have to now ensure that you use the keywords in the right way in order to get the maximum results from them.

Let’s start with looking at one of the most popular myths that are associated with the use of keywords – Many people think that stuffing their webpages with keywords will make their web pages more attractive to the search engines. However, this is not true. In fact, most search engines are intelligent enough to recognize keyword stuffing. The search engines either ignore such websites or black list them (remove them from their index).

In this context, let me introduce the term “Keyword density” to you. Keyword density of a particular keyword is defined as number of times that particular keyword occurs on the webpage divided by the total number of words on that page. It is expressed in percentage terms.

Generally, a keyword density of 2% or less is considered quite appropriate. You might, however, use a number of keywords on the same webpage while keeping the keyword density of each at less than 2%.

For each webpage, you must use a different set of keywords so that your website is indexed for all keywords. However, that doesn’t mean that if you have targeted a keyword for one webpage you cannot use it for another webpage. Overlap is ok and even recommended. Furthermore, if you have a large number of webpages, you might even use low priority keywords (the ones that are remotely relevant to your website).

You must also use 3-4 high ranking keywords to form a meaningful page title (HTML <title> tag) for your web page; because search engines (and their web crawlers) attach a lot of importance to page title. Similarly, keywords should also be included in the Meta tags (‘Description’ and ‘Keywords’ tags). ‘Description’ tag should include a short (around 200 characters) description of the contents of the web page; and ‘Keywords’ tag can contain 4-5 keywords.

These are just some basic tips on the usage of keywords. If you experiment, you will come up with more tricks yourself. I too plan to write another article on usage of keywords.

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