Maximizing Your Keyword-Placement Strategy

By A. P. Traylor

In order to bump up your placement in a directory’s results, you need an implementation strategy .

As you know, search engine optimization (SEO) is increasingly important to a Web site’s success. More and more, consumers are relying on sites like Google™ and Yahoo!® to find products and content—and will rarely go beyond the first two pages of search results to find what they want. To take full advantage of all the potential traffic and profit on the Web, you need to become search-savvy and apply some keyword strategies to your site.

If you haven’t chosen keywords for your Web site, there are a number of handy tools available online to help you. Overture®, for instance, offers a Search Term Suggestion Tool that is particularly easy to use. After entering a term, this tool totals the number of searches performed on particular phrases in the past month and offers a list of alternative keywords for you to consider.

If you’ve already selected the terms for your SEO campaign, you need a strategy for how you’ll successfully use those keywords. The factors that search engines take into account when indexing goes beyond one keyword per page placement, and the competition is fierce. In order to bump up your placement in a directory’s results, you need an implementation strategy that includes:

• Include a keyphrase in the first sentence of your text.
• Use a keyword in your URLs, titles, and description tags, which are also searched by engines. For example, if your keyphrase is “Boston antiques,” name your page “bostonantiques.htm” or “bostonantiques.shtml.”
• Include keywords in headline tags. Keep the h tags before and after the full sentence.
• Put relevant keywords in your ALT text (also known as rollover text). This is the word or phrase that appears when visitors hover over an image, and search engines consider it part of the site text.
• Include keywords in your page link names. Partial keywords will help, too. If you have a navigation map on your pages, use adjectives. Rather than using simply “About our products,” use “About our antiques,” instead.
• Likewise, linking keyphrases in your text will increase your search engine position. Called “deep linking,” this includes in-text linking with a keyphrase from the landing page.

• Search engines only search text. If your opening page is a Flash movie or is an image map, the page won’t be indexed.
• As tempting as it is to load your pages with keywords and phrases, don’t try to trick the search engines—they’re smarter than you think. Spamming, or filling a page chock-full of keywords, will get you penalized, or banned altogether. By using the terms wisely and sparingly, around three to five times per page, you will keep in good standing with search engines and your copy will likely become more reader-friendly.