Top 5 Places to use your Keywords for the Best Results

If you’ve gotten to this blog post and you haven’t decided on your keywords or phrases yet please take the time to go back and read our previous post entitled How to Determine the Best Keywords for Search Engine Optimization Campaigns. For the remainder of today’s post we are going to assume that you have narrowed down your target keywords and are ready to place them into your website.

Depending on the way that your website was built, your abilities will vary when it comes to editing text in certain places. The following outline the best, most general, options you should have available to you if you have access to updating your own website.

Page Titles

The titles of your pages should include exact keywords or phrases that you would like to be found for. Search engines give your page titles a higher ranking than the rest of the text on the page, so you want them to be effective. For example, instead of using “About Us” as a page title, try using “About Buffalo Wired – Business Technology Service Providers”.

Headlines:

There are several levels of headlines that can be helpful for SEO purposes, but the most important would be Headline 1 (H1) and Headline 2 (H2). These headlines are usually located in the content of a web page and are meant to highlight the important pieces of information on the page. Each page should only have one H1, but can have multiple H2s. You can think of an H1 as the main topic for your page and H2s are the subheadings underneath it. Include your keywords in the headlines for an added SEO boost.

Image Names

Before you upload your images take a few minutes to name them using your keywords and descriptive phrases. Search engine crawlers cannot “see” your images, so the only way that they know what they are is to “read” the image names. While “DSC001.jpg” won’t tell them anything something like “red-mustang-2010.jpg” would be much more helpful.

Image Alt Tags:

When you add an image to your website you should have an option to change or add an “alt tag”. Take advantage of this! Alt tags work in a similar fashion to the image names, they help the search engines to know what your image is of. You should use keywords and phrases, along with part/product numbers for your images, when applicable. These are also important accessibility tools for users who cannot see the page to get an idea of what an image may be.

Links

This is another easy spot that is rarely taken advantage of for SEO. Link text in your content is given a higher rating than plain text, so it only makes sense to use it to your advantage. Instead of a link for your services that just says “Click here” try using links like “click to learn about our business technology services“. Your SEO reports will thank you for it.

Things to remember:

• Search engines look for keywords that are relevant to the content on the page.
• If one of your keywords is specific to a service you only mention on a subpage of the website, specifically about that service, then you should use that keyword on that page, and not on the rest that aren’t about that service.
• Don’t over-do it.
• Search engines will penalize your website rankings if they suspect that you’re “stuffing” your content. Don’t try to shove multiple keywords into one title, image, or page, especially if they don’t correspond with the content.
• If you just don’t have time, access, or the desire to make some of these SEO changes for yourself, you can always contact Buffalo Wired to perform an SEO audit of your site and even make the changes for you.