The Nitty Gritty of Keyword Usage

I’ve mentioned before that keyword usage, while there’s no standard, should account for no more than 15% of your page content. For 300 words on any given page that gives you 15 times you can use a given keyword or phrase.

Are you properly researching your keyword usage?

Will Google and Bing smite your website if you go over the limit? Meh! Probably not, but it’s a good idea to keep within the suggested 15% usage limit. Keyword stuffing will get you smacked down pretty good. So keep that in mind.

Okay, great! Now that we’ve got that bit of mess down, I can get to writing up my content. Right? Not so fast, brochacho! Before you put the finger to keyboard think about a few simple things first…

What is the audience for the given keyword?

• Not exactly rocket science here, but it’s important to think about who will consume this content and write for them. For this article, I’m expecting the users to be less than well-versed on SEO best-practices.
• Choose a single subject for your page, article, post. That is, when you write, keep your content laser focused on one topic. While this isn’t an absolute, this strategy helps us spoon-feed search engines relevant content for them to index. For instance, the topic for this article is “keyword.“

How and where should my keyword be placed?

That’s a great question! Reference the image below. Click on it for a bigger version, if needed.

Where should your keywords be placed? This is what came back for a number of pages on a website I manage... See? Even the experts don't always get it right! =)

The above image is a quick hit of where you ought to be using your keywords. So here’s a brief description of each item.

• Title – The title for any given page is among the most important places to put your keyword. Notice what this article’s title is?
• The URL – This element along with other elements I’ll touch on are parsed and indexed by search engine’s robots/spiders. This should also include your keyword. What’s the URL of this article?
• Meta description - This element isn’t something your average visitor will see, however, search engines typically pay attention to this and index it for your pages. Also include your keyword here. Keep the meta desc. under 160 characters.


Place your keywords in H1 tags, preferably the title

• H1 - the H1 tag is typically only used once per page and is usually best used when used to wrap around your page’s title. That’s what we do here, at DigiSavvy. Look at the code to the right, so you understand how this looks “under the hood.”
• H2 – 4 Tags – In addition to the H1 tag, which you should really only use once, there are tags H2 through H6. You can use these multiple times on a given page. For this article I’ve used both H2 and H4. Now, I’ve heard tell that you should use your H1-6 tags in order, but I’ve seen no evidence to state that you should… Just as long as you use them, you’re good.
• Body – The body is the whole of your content. This text you’re reading is within the “body” of this piece’s of content. Again, keep your key phrase usage within 10 to 15% of the total amount of content (word count) of your page.
• B/Strong -Search engines give a bit more priority to certain markup tags and  <strong> is one of those tags as is <em> (italics). It’s a good idea to keep your content easy to read. Large blocks of text are hard for the eyes to digest. You can draw emphasis and break up your content and make it easier to consume by using well placed H2-6 tags, Strong and EM tags as well. Have I used those tags in this piece?
• Img ALT – Oh the image “alt” tag is one that is often overlooked and the source of browbeating by my fellow SEOs and developers. The alt tag merely applies a description to the image, yet it’s one that search engines index and use! Hence the importance for a seemingly unimportant page element. Make it a habit to use alt tags on every image, even background images!

Hopefully you’ll find this information useful in building your website’s presence. Ask your questions or make your comments in the form below.

We always love to hear from clients and our readers, feel free to contact us.

PS – Pro tip: When naming your files with spaces, replace those spaces with a hyphen i.e. this keyword.jpg would be this-keyword.jpg instead. Search engine, spiders. robots have an easier time indexing hyphenated words as opposed to those that use an underscore.