So, you’ve decided what search terms you want to target and you’ve built your site. You thought about SEO and made sure that your site is search engine friendly, but now it’s time to do the time consuming task of content optimisation.
Firstly, the golden rule – don’t rush things. The better your content the more likely that people will read it and, hopefully, link to it.
Secondly, make sure you include the keywords that you want to concentrate on as often as you can without going over the top. The use of headings, stand out points and well placed images will all help with the next step.
Finally, optimise your HTML tags. For a page to be as effective as possibly with regards to SEO it needs to contain your targetted keywords in the following elements (most important first)
- URL
- Title
- Meta Description (mainly for helping with click-through rates)
- H1
- H2
- H3
- H4
- Content (The first 80-100 words are the most important)
- <b> and <strong>
- Image ‘alt’ text
Ideally you’ll have your main keyword in the url, title, h1 tag and meta description. From there you dot the term in any of the ‘lower’ headings, include it a couple of times in the first 80 words and then again as often as you can get away with in the rest of the text. If you can, make a few of those uses bold and include it in any image alts (but make sure they’re relevant – don’t use ‘dog’ as the alt text for a picture of a cat).
Finally, I’ll say it again, don’t jam too many keywords into your content. Not only will it sound strange but you’re more likely to penalised by the search engines.