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By JeffreyRomano, July 16, 2009 9:14 pm

Following up on my previous post which explained why it is important to choose your keywords wisely, I will now explain which parts of your site you must check for proper  keyword optimization. Be sure to check your:

1) Domain Name – one reason why many companies rank for their brand name is because it is synonymous with their domain name.

2) Title Tag – this is very powerful and easy to do. The most common mistakes here is of choosing too many keywords or using words that are too generic. You can forget about ranking for ‘cars’, ‘house’ or ‘holiday’, so be more specific.

3) Description Tag – this is the short paragraph that accompanies the link to your website when you click via a search engine. You have about 165 characters to explain what the page is about, in a persuasive manner, using your keywords.

4) Headers – though not the most important factor in terms of keyword optimization, if you can include a keyword in your headers it helps. However, it’s more important to have sensible headers which enhance the overall user experience. If your header just says ‘Welcome’, don’t lose any sleep over it.

5) Body Text – having your keywords mentioned at least once in the body text is a good idea even because it makes it clearer for the user what the web page is about. Search engines like this too.

6) ALT Tags – its been reported that this has recently gained in importance recently. The ALT tag is the text that appears when you put your mouse over an image. So for example, if you have a website selling several cars, it would make sense to have the tag indicate the model of car in the picture.

7) Anchor Text – this is another big one. Anchor text is basically the text of links pointing to your page. For example, below in this article I have a link, and its anchor text is ‘Webmaster Cheat Sheet for Keyword Optimization’. So what you have to do is ensure that the links pointing to your webpage are using the keywords you want. This is not always in your power, but when it is, keep your keywords in mind.

To keep the above handy, I’ve created a ‘Webmaster Cheat Sheet for Keyword Optimization’ (PDF) which you can download for free. This will help you in the future when updating pages or even creating new websites.

Please leave a comment if you found the above helpful or if you want me to write about something in particular.

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By JeffreyRomano, July 13, 2009 11:18 pm

When thinking about keywords, there are two important things that you have to keep in mind. Keywords are:

1) The words people use to search for the content they are looking for,
2) The words that enable your website to be found by people searching for its content

The above are two very powerful facts. Facts which unfortunately are not considered enough when websites are developed, published and updated. The result is that there are a lot of websites, even of web design firms, which offer useful content but which give very little attention to keyword use. The result is that it becomes harder for these websites to rank in search engines for the words they want.

To perform ‘keyword optimization’ website owners must first decide which keywords are most suitable for their website, and then use these words to rank in search engines. How to do this exactly will be explained in later posts, though one important method is to include the keywords in the Title Tag. This is the sentence right at the top of your browser window, above the ‘Back’ button.

For now just have a look at your website and your Title Tags and see whether these include your keywords. If you are not sure, just post your website address in the comments and I’ll do my best to check it out for you.