When writing your home page and other important pages, remember to shoehorn keywords into your website’s nooks and crannies. Send this post along to your web designer to keep him or her on track as well.
(Note: a writer at heart, I probably too often ignore these search engine optimization rules on my own site. I want my own sentences to sing. That said, some of these tips don’t interfere with fine writing.)
- Put your keywords up front in headlines (within first 3 – 5 words), as I did for this post.
- Put your keywords in page titles (different from headlines).
- Anchor links (to and from other posts, pages, etc) need to contain your keywords. The days of “click here” and “read more” are over. If you are a financial planner, both external and internal site links should say things like: “College Fund Pitfalls” or “2012 Tax Changes.” If you own a pool service company, links need to read, “pool cleaning tips after a fire” or “maintaining healthy cholrine levels.”
- The one keyword (or phrase) per page rule still holds.
- When appropriate, put keywords in the alt tags of photos. Beware! If you put “solar panels” in the alt tag of a photo depicting a bikini-clad woman, Google may ding you.
- Don’t forget Meta tags! Although currently the Google algorhythm doesn’t seem to placing as much weight on meta tags (keyword descriptions of each page) lately, one never knows when it may again.
Know the rules and then ignore them. A business needs to appeal to human readers as much as robots. Further, if a page developer gets the top 20% of the most important SEO right (titles, URLs, internal links) 80% of the SEO value can be squared away.
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