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Search Engine Optimization - Keywords Tips, Strategies & Tools

If you've been researching search engine optimization for any length of time, no doubt a couple of the terms you'd have come across regularly are keywords and key phrases. Even if you're fairly familiar with keyword strategies, read on, you may pick up some tips and advice you haven't read before.

What are keywords and key phrases?

Basically they are just words and phrases that users may utilize to search on a topic via a search engine. On your site, keywords and key phrases are the targeted terms featuring heavily in your content.

Where should I use keywords and key phrases?

Keywords should appear in your visible content, but also in your meta-tags, page title tags and in anchor text. Anchor text optimization has become increasing popular in recent times, but it's important to note that it's only one aspect of a keyword strategy.

Another place you can add keywords is to your images. You can do this by adding the "alt" attribute to the image.

Example:

Our recommendation is that you link images you have added "alt" text to a relevant page. Don't be tempted to engage in keyword stuffing i.e. the practice of adding multiple keywords or lengthy key phrases to image alt tags - keep it brief.

For FrontPage users, adding alt text is very easy. Simple right mouse button click over the image and select "Picture properties". On the General tab, you'll see "text". Enter a relevant key phrase in there.

It's also important to have a good representation of target keywords and phrases in the first paragraph of your main body text - and that's not just for search engines.

Another important strategy is to use keywords in your file names. For example, on an article such as this about keywords, a file name of keyword-tips.htm would be appropriate. File names do play a part in most major search engines' ranking algorithms.

If you haven't purchased a domain name as yet for your new project, also consider registering a name containing keywords.

Optimize for multiple keywords and phrases

Another very important point is to not aim for no.1 rankings on one word keywords or the most popular key phrases for starters; you'll have a hard time doing so given all the competition - and really, there's no need to.

If you achieve good rankings on a slew of 2, 3 or even 4 semi-popular keyphrase combinations, you'll most likely do very well in terms of traffic. Search engine users are a little more savvy these days and tend to use multiple word queries in their searches to help narrow down the results as often they are disappointed with the results on the most popular terms.

This strategy is called "the long tail".

Related keywords and keyphrases and LSI

Somewhat related to addressing the long tail is the concept of LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing. LSI is being increasingly used by search engines as a way of evaluating and ranking pages. In a nutshell, LSI technology can recognize the relationships between different words and a single concept or topic. This allows content publishers more freedom in crafting their pages and also a better experience for the reader. Again, it's a case of not putting all your keyword eggs into one basket and these days you can write more naturally without it negatively impacting on your search engine rankings.

Keywords aren't just about search engines

If you design your site specifically for search engines, then you may get plenty of visitors, but your sales may be very low. Always bear in mind that you should primarily design for humans, not robots. Your marketing copy needs to be engaging, your general content interesting. All things in balance.