How to SEO Your Content – 16 Places to Put Your Keyword Phrase

Whenever you create content for your website (like a web page or a blog post), hopefully, you’re considering search engine optimization too. Creating content that focuses on a single specific word or better yet, a keyword phrase, is going to help you get found on the search engines like Google.

When we teach our SEO classes, we instruct the students that for every page of content, there should only be one target keyword phrase for that page. So if you have 10 phrases you want to be found for, you should have at least 10 pages of content (one page – or more – for each phrase).

So in creating that content, you have at least 16 places you can put your keyword phrase. The more of these that you match, the more you’re telling Google, “this page is all about the phrase: ‘keyword phrase‘”. Then the next time someone searches for that phrase, then your web page may show up.

Here are 16 places you can put your keyword phrase to help your SEO efforts.

Page Title (or Title Tag)

The page title is the most influential place to have your keyword phrase. Google pays the most attention to the page title, and if your keyword phrase is there, that’s going to affect your web page the most. It’s important to make sure your phrase is at the beginning of the title, and not towards the end – position matters.

You have 100 characters to put in the page title (including spaces and punctuation), but only about 65 will display in the Google search results. Google tends to replace your given title with whatever it feels is appropriate, so it won’t necessarily show what you put in there.

Page Description (or META Description Tag)

The page description does not influence your position in the search results. However, it can influence clicks because it’s your first, and possibly last, opportunity to market to your customer. The page description often (but not always) shows up as the two black lines of text in Google’s search results. Having a great marketing message with your target keyphrase can help influence who clicks on you and who doesn’t.

Page Title and Description often show in Google search results

Keywords META Tag

The keywords tag is 100% ignored by Google, so most of the time, I just leave it blank. However, you can put your keyword phrase there, and some of the other search engines may pay a small bit of attention to it.

Body Content

The body is the main part of the article, and tells Google all about the page. Google is looking at the text, the surrounding text, and everything else on the page to determine what that page is about, or the “theme” of the page.

You don’t want to just repeat your keyword phrase in your text and try to stuff it into every corner and every sentence you can. That sounds spammy, and doesn’t work. The page of content should include your keyword phrase, variations of it, as well as synonyms and antonyms.

Within the text, you can include it in several other places:

Header Tags

The H1 or main header tag should only appear once on the page, and it should be at the top. It should include your keyword phrase at the beginning.

You can include one or more H2 tags (or H3, H4, H5 and H6) as sub-headers. Google counts all of them as the same, even though they are often formatted differently. The header tags can also help break up the blocks of text so it’s easier on the eyes and easier to skim or read.

Formatted Text

Google also gives a slight boost to bulleted text and bold. So if your keyword phrases are in bullets or bolded, that can help a little too.

Links

If you have your keyword phrase in an outgoing link that’s going to a related page (either on your site or even someone else’s site), it’s been shown that these outgoing links actually help with your SEO efforts.

URL

Your web address for any page on your website has four components, and you should include your keyword phrase anytime you can.

• Domain name – You don’t have a lot of control over your domain name, and you can’t change it for every phrase. But if it’s in your domain name, like www.keywordphrase.com, it will help. By the way, having multiple keyword domain names pointing at the same website actually hurts your SEO efforts, and does not help.
• Subdomain name – Your subdomain can include keywords. So as an example, keyword.yourcompany.com would help your SEO efforts.
• Folder name – If you break your pages into folders or sub-pages, the folder name can include your keyword phrase, like www.yourcompany.com/keyword/page1.html
• Page name – Finally, the actual page name can (and should) include your keyword phrase, like www.yourcompany.com/keyword-phrase.html.

Graphics

You can add title, description and keywords to the graphic (click for a larger version)

Your graphics can include your keyword phrase in several places, and they all help.

• Alt tag – This is describing the actual image, but don’t stuff your keywords. If it’s a picture of a white horse, just make the alt tag “white horse”. The alt tag is really intended for people with sight impairment or who block images to see what images are on the page. You don’t want them to see “holiday cruises holiday cruises holiday cruises”.
• File name – make sure the actual file name of the image includes your keyword phrase, like “white-horse.jpg”
• SEO properties of the graphic file – If you have Photoshop or other graphic editing programs, you can actually edit the Title, Description and Keywords meta tags in the file itself.

See the example to the right, the file name is “best-video-marketing-platform.jpg”, and I’ve inserted the SEO properties too. If you search Google images for “best video marketing platform”, you should see it #1 in the results (the “Tell Stories” graphic).

Incoming Links

You don’t generally have a lot of control over the links that come into your website, but if you have a relationship with the editor of the content, you can ask them to make sure that:

• Keyword phrase – the incoming link text includes your keyword phrase, but make sure it points to a target page that is all about that keyword phrase.
• Company name – the incoming link text is your company name. This is called a citation, and Google values this. They actually changed their stance a couple years ago, and are now more interested in citations than actual keyword phrase text links.

Example of a Well-Optimized Web Page

Here’s an example of a well-optimized web page. The search term is “pomeranian puppy training”, and you can see many of the elements described above in this page:

www.dog-obedience-training-review.com/pomeranian-puppy.html

Review your own content and see if you’ve gotten many or most of the spots in your own setup. Pick a few pages, and do an audit to see if you’re good or if you need to improve. I also like the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool to crawl your site, and spit out a report. It’s such a huge time saver.

However, it’s easy to get carried away. You can “over-optimize” a web page by trying to cram your phrase into corner of the content, and Google will actually downgrade that page in the search results. Just make it sound natural and you should be fine.

Also note that just because you put your phrase into all 16 places, it doesn’t mean that you’ll be number 1 for a search phrase. There are many other factors that Google takes into account, but this is a good start that your competitors probably aren’t doing.

What are your thoughts? Did I miss any place to put your keyword phrase? Tell me in the comments below.