Back in the old days, search engine algorithms were pretty primitive and so their web crawlers needed help in identifying the information featured on a website. You could write up a big list of keyword tags, the crawlers would latch on to them, and your website would be thrust to the top of search engines. However, now that the algorithms have gotten more sophisticated, it’s no longer enough for your keywords to just be lurking on the back-end. For your website to have proper search engine optimization, your keywords need to be in the website’s main text.

So how do you make certain that your keywords are in the right place to send this people to your site? Keep the following tips in mind:

Be natural. If you can fit your main keyword into the first paragraph, go for it. But the important thing is to only use keywords in places they sound right. They shouldn’t sound out-of-place or forced to anyone reading the page.

Don’t overstuff your keywords. If your keywords are being overused on your webpage, the search engines will start to lose interest. Having 3%-4% of your content being keywords is a good balance, or to put it another way, include 2-3 keywords on a typical webpage or 4-5 on a larger one. If a few more keywords show-up in the natural flow of the page, that’s okay, but it’s probably not going to boost your ranking.

Use appropriate synonyms. It’s good to use other words that mean the same as your keywords, but remember that certain words can have more than one meaning. This can confuse web crawlers, so be careful.

Use main keyword in title. Search engines put a lot of value in titles, and that’s also the first thing that most of your visitors will see. Each page should have a unique title. At the end of the day, the quality of your web content is more important than the amount of your keywords. Nowadays, web crawlers are generally clever enough to know when you’re trying to trick them, so make certain to present them with a website they can see their viewers would like. If you do that, and fit the keywords in subtlety and effectively, you’ll be able to see your site rise much higher on the search rankings.

References

Bruce Clay, “Latent Semantic Indexing.”

Mandy Barrington, Sitepoint. “The 5 Most Valuable Places for Keywords on Your Website.”