Keywords are phrases or single words you can use on your website for the purpose of search engine optimization (SEO), which is about improving the visibility of your content on search engines. SEO keywords are a bonus to your brand in the sense that your target audience uses similar words when searching for answers to their questions.
With proper research and optimization, keywords can act as the channel through which your audience is connected to your website.Read on to find out why keywords still matter in SEO today.
Why Keyword Meta Tags Are No Longer Widely Used
Keyword meta tags used to be highly regarded. But nowadays, they don't matter as much to search engines. For this reason, most websites, including the high-authority ones, no longer use keyword meta tags.
The reason meta tags have lost their sparkle is keyword spamming. Search engine providers realized that website owners would tag their content with certain keywords, yet the content isn't in any way related to the tags. And many of those who included keywords in their content did so in a spammy way just to rank highly for those keywords.
As such, search engines would provide search results that didn’t sufficiently answer the questions of the web user. Eventually, search engine developers changed their approach to keywords to ensure that search results are more helpful to users.
The Importance Of Keywords In SEO
Despite the issues of keyword spamming, search engines have greatly evolved. Although they still use keywords for ranking web pages, they do so in a smarter way that filters out sites with keyword spamming.
Because of that, users are presented with valuable, relevant, highly focused, and quality content.Therefore, when developing your content, consider using one keyword for your target audience to make your content achieve those qualities. Without focus, there’s a high probability that your thoughts would be scattered, which would lead to neither relevant nor helpful content.
In case your website content wasn’t written with those critical guidelines in mind, there are online tools you can use to find keyword opportunities for your website and edit your content accordingly. Doing so will improve the credibility of your website to search engines, and your search engine ranking will considerably improve.
Tips For Proper Keyword Use
Here are a few handy tips to apply when optimizing your website content with keywords:
- Do Research: You need to do proper research and come up with a concrete list of key phrases and keywords that will be the main target and focus for your website. This is your first step in building an authority website.
- Focus OnOne Keyword: When working on a specific page,choose one of the shortlisted keywords and focus on it throughout the content.
- Use Keyword Variations: For the chosen keyword, you may want to use it verbatim as well as its variations. For example, if your keyword is ‘coffee beans,’ you can branch out to variations like ‘fresh coffee beans’ and ‘fresh coffee.’
- Track Keyword Performance: Once you start implementing keyword SEO strategies for your website, it’s important to monitor your performance over time. It wouldbenefit you to know how much your ranking for a particular keyword is improving day by day.
You can try this rank tracking software for thousands of unique positions. Such tools allow you to determine whether your newly adopted content strategy is paying off and what you need to do to outperform your competitors.
Where Do You Use SEO Keywords?
Here are some of the areas on your website where you can place keywords:
- The webpage address
- The title of an article
- The first and last paragraphs of your content
- Subheadings
- Meta descriptions
- An optimized link
- An optimized image
How Can You Tell If You Have Spammy Content?
If you’re not sure if the placement of your keywords is as natural as it should be, the first thing to do is read whatever you’ve written out loud and pay close attention to how the content feels or sounds. Here’s what you should watch out forin order to identify spammy content:
- A word or phrase is repeated excessively throughout the content.
- There are sections that requireheavy editing due to odd phrasing.
- The content is difficult to read because thereare sentences or phrasesthat don’t make sense due to the unnecessary presence of keywords.
Conclusion
The bottom line is, if SEO keywords are used appropriately, you can be sure that the search engine ranking of your website will constantly improve. Just remember that although keywordsin general are beneficial, too many of them will do you more harm than good.
