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.