site bytes

Last time, we talked about the basics of writing content to help attract relevant traffic to our site. Now that you’ve put some thought into your keywords and phrases, where should they go?

text: You’ve heard it before, “content is king.” If your keywords and phrases aren’t in your content (that’s the text on your pages), then a search engine will think that those words aren’t important for your site and won’t rank you highly for them.

title tag: These words are what appear at the top of a user’s browser when they view a web page. The title tag is one of the most important places (to a search engine) to place your keywords.

header tags: Your content probably has a layout designed to sell your product or communicate your message, with important topics headlined or emphasized. Similarly, you can add labels in your code to help search engines understand your content. Search engines see headings which are labeled as <h1> as being the most important, and <h2> as the second-most important and so on.

anchor tags: Anchor tags are the words that you use to link to your (or others’) web pages.

alt tags: Alt tags are used to label graphics/images. They appear in place of the image when a user has their graphics turned off, or when the graphics take time to load or if someone is using an assistive device to surf the web.

other meta tags: The meta “keywords” tag can be used to highlight important terms within your content – the ones that should bring up your web pages when a user enters them in a search box. The meta “description” tag gives a search engine the words that you would like to be displayed when you come up in its results. A search engine may index up to 250 characters, although fewer characters may be displayed in the results.

Note that different search engines display results in different ways, so at best, these tags can influence results displays only in the search engines that support them.

focus on what’s important

No matter how much research you do on keywords and their placement, don’t forget that, first and foremost, you’re writing for your clients and prospects! Use keywords when you can, but keep your writing natural and appealing to your target audience.

Tags: keyword placement, keywords, meta tags, search, tags

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under getting started, keywords, search engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.