Any SEO firm will tell you that keyword research and identification is a major factor in their optimization strategies; that much is a no brainer. But knowing where to place those keywords can be a little trickier. Here are some tips you can use to help you know where to place keywords and phrases in your webpage:
o Title Tags:
The title tag is a great place to add your targeted keywords. The text inside the title tag displays as your page’s title in the search engines’ results. The title tag should be no more than 6 or 7 words, with the keywords appearing at the beginning of the tag.
o Anchor text:
Anchor text links are ranked as very valuable to search engines, so plenty of them should be in your web pages. The most powerful anchor texts of all are those whose text contains targeted keywords. Each click on an inbound keyword anchor link will count as a vote of that keyword to a search engine’s rankings.
o Heading Tags:
Adding keywords in heading tags (H1, H2 and H3) is as beneficial as putting them in the page title. Do not use words like “and”, “for”, “the”, etc. as they are ignored by search engine spiders. Try to make best possible use of this place in your website.
o URL:
Including targeted keywords in your website’s URL is helpful from an SEO perspective. Also be sure to use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URL to separate text.
o Meta tags:
Although Meta tags are no longer recognized by Google, they are still helpful for other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. If you are optimizing for other search engines, it’s a good idea to place some keywords in Meta tags.
o Alt tags:
Search engine spiders are unable to read images or graphics. If you have images in your web pages, then make sure to include several top targeted keywords in the ALT tags. Be careful not to “stuff” the alt tags with too many keywords, however, or your rankings could be dropped.
o Website Body:
Strategically “sprinkling” keywords throughout the body of your website is ideal. All pages should contain at least the top 2 keywords that you are targeting, and all articles and other content should be peppered with various targeted keywords as much as possible.
Using this short list to help you with your keyword placements will surely benefit your search engine rankings.