With more and more people using search engines every day, using keywords effectively in your website text is more vital than ever before. Let’s discuss keywords?
Keywords are simply the words and phrases that humans use when they search the web. That’s it! Somewhat confusing, a keyword is not necessarily a single word, but can be a phrase or list of several words, but we still call them keywords.
Keywords are simply the words and phrases that humans use when they search the web. That’s it! Somewhat confusing, a keyword is not necessarily a single word, but can be a phrase or list of several words, but we still call them keywords.
Short Tail
The shorter, more competitive keywords are sometimes referred to as the “short tail”. An example short tail keyword that we optimise our site for is “internet marketing”. As you can imagine, this is a quite competitive term, with many internet marketing companies competing for high rankings on this term. Other example short tail terms in this area are “SEO”, “online marketing”, “search marketing” and more. So the short tail keywords are usually very common searches, being searched for many times per day.
Long Tail
The long tail of search can be a gold mine for search traffic. These are less competitive terms that are not searched for as often. Usually they are longer keywords, like for example “internet marketing company dublin ireland”. This is likely to be searched FAR less often than the short tail terms I mentioned above. In fact, a Google employee reported said recently (and I’m still looking for the source on this) that “40% of all searchs on Google everyday have never been seen before”. These are long tail keywords, most definitely!
How You Can Use This Information
We know that both these short tail and long tail ideas exist – how do you take advantage of this for your website? Lets deal with the short tail first – what you should do is create webpages/blog posts/articles (”pages”) targeting each one of these short tail terms. It may seem like a lot of keywords but there are a finite number of short tail terms so it’s possible to hit them all. Start out with targetting only one, e.g. my company started targeting “internet marketing” first, and will expand to others later.
It’s not actually possible to target long tail keywords, yet we will still try, and what’s more, succeed! How is this possible? Simply by adding naturally written content to your website you will be hitting tens and possibly hundreds of long tail terms with each article. Each one of these keywords will be searched very rarely, but the cumulative effect of hundreds, and eventually thousands of long tail terms will be a lot of visits to your website. So keep adding interesting and valuable content to your website as often as possible.
Write Naturally and Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Search engines count the number of times a keyword appears on a page. The more times a term appears, the more relevant the page is to a search for that term – up to a point! That point is when your webpage starts reading like it was written by a marketer on speed and the keyword appears every 3rd word. The best advice is to write naturally – for humans! Write your copy for humans including your keywords a few times and the search engines will take care of the rest. There are also concepts like “stemming” – where search engines know that “target”, “targets”, “targeting”, “targeted”, etc all have the same stem and are related. A similar, more advanced topic is Latent Semantic Indexing which is outside the scope of this article and deserves one all of it’s own!
Search engines count the number of times a keyword appears on a page. The more times a term appears, the more relevant the page is to a search for that term – up to a point! That point is when your webpage starts reading like it was written by a marketer on speed and the keyword appears every 3rd word. The best advice is to write naturally – for humans! Write your copy for humans including your keywords a few times and the search engines will take care of the rest. There are also concepts like “stemming” – where search engines know that “target”, “targets”, “targeting”, “targeted”, etc all have the same stem and are related. A similar, more advanced topic is Latent Semantic Indexing which is outside the scope of this article and deserves one all of it’s own!
Keyword Percentage
Some people ask me “what percentage should the keyword be per page”. The way to figure this out is to count the total number of words on the page, and count the number of times the keyword appears, as a percentage of this. Search engine optimisation consultations often quote numbers of 6-8% with a maximum of 12-13%. I would definitely recommend sticking to the lower end of these numbers, but again if there’s one thing you should take from this article it’s write often, and naturally, for a human audience and let the numbers take care of themselves.
About the Author
Alastair McDermottAlastair is the founder and Managing Director of Log On. Alastair loves generating ideas. He is the left-brain of the company, with a love of problem solving, data analysis and business strategising.
Managing Director, Log On Internet Marketing Ltd, Dublin, Ireland.
Managing Director, Log On Internet Marketing Ltd, Dublin, Ireland.
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