Bright Ideas # 47 – The Key to Using Keywords: Part VI of Why Writing for the Web is Different 

If you were with me last week, then hopefully you have a nice little list of keyword phrases put together for your home page. So this week it’s time to learn what to do with them.

If you missed last week’s edition in my series on Why Writing for the Web is Different, I’ll fill you in real quick so you can follow along…

When you write content for the Web, you aren’t just writing for your customers. You are also writing for search engines. Search engines have these cool programs called spiders that crawl through your site, see what it’s all about, and report back to the search engine database.

These spiders are looking for just one thing: Words that tell them what your site is all about.

And not just any words—keywords.

Then search engines try to match your keywords with terms and phrases people are using to search the Web in order to provide relevant search results. So your goal is to come up with the best keywords for your site. That way it will show up higher in the search engine results.

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Drawing the spiders to your keywords
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If you’ve done a good job writing content for your customers, you should have hundreds of words on the main pages of your site. So how do the spiders know which ones are your keywords?

Two ways…

1) Repetition

The spiders assume that if a keyword phrase is repeated multiple times on a page, that must be what that page is all about.

However, that doesn’t mean you want to pack your pages with keywords willy-nilly. Doing that will get you penalized, or removed from the search engine database completely.

You see, a few years ago some sneaky folks found a way to trick the spiders with keywords. How? By repeating them over and over, but making them the same color as the Web page background so customers couldn’t see them. This worked great until the search engine administrators figured out what was going on and cracked down hard.

So what you want to do is use keywords naturally in your text. Usually, repeating any phrase two to four times in your body copy will do the trick.

2) Proper keyword placement

There are certain locations in your content where your words automatically have more importance. So you want to focus on putting keywords in these spots whenever possible.

These are:

• Headlines – Think about it, headlines tell us humans what kind of info we can expect to find. And they work the same way for the spiders.
• Subheads – Ditto
• Link Text – Anytime you have a link in your text to another page or site, carefully consider what it says. Because spiders assume those words indicate what kind of info can be found on the other end of that link. So avoid linking to words like “More” or “Click Here”.
• Beginning and end of pages – Both people and spiders tend to put more weight on what you say at the beginning and end of pages. At the same time, they assume the middle is just additional details.
• Beginning and end of paragraphs – Ditto again

At first glance, this can seem like a lot to remember when you are writing. So don’t.

If you’re writing from scratch, just put your keywords at the top of page and look at them periodically to keep them in mind. They’ll often end up woven nicely into the text almost by osmosis.

If you’ve got your text fairly dialed in, then just go back and edit your keyword phrases into the critical spots.

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How do you know if you’ve overused your keywords?
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Read your text out loud. If it sounds like a six year old wrote your copy, you’ve used them too many times. If it sounds smooth and natural you should be good to go.

Keep in mind, writing keyword-rich content isn’t a quick fix that immediately skyrockets you to the top of the search engine rankings. But it is a simple, inexpensive and effective way to make a positive difference.

So as you continue adding content just keep one main idea planted firmly in your mind…

The search engines are looking for relevant sites. The more keyword-rich content you have on your site, the more relevant you are. And the more NEW keyword-rich content you add to your site, the better. Because fresh content makes your site appear even more relevant.

But you can do more with keywords than just use them in your text. So next week, I’ll give you a few more ways to put your keywords to work.

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Do you have a marketing, advertising or writing question you’d like to have answered? Email me and you might see the answer in a future edition of Bright Ideas.

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