To attract the right visitors to your website, use keyword phrases rather than single keywords. This assists search engines in directing users to more relevant results.
A keyword phrase is two or more words typed as a search query, similar to how a keyword is a single word used as a search query. Spanish Language School in Madrid, for example, is a good example of a keyword phrase.
Users of search engines find what they are looking for by typing in specific keywords or keyword phrases and selecting the most relevant result. You want your site to have as many chances as possible to appear in those search results. In other words, you should try to use every keyword phrase that you believe someone might use to find your website.
When people conduct a search, they typically enter a keyword phrase rather than a single keyword. Fifty-eight percent of search queries contain three or more words. As a result, having keyword phrases on your site increases your chances of ranking higher on the page rank (because more keywords match the search query).
Because more words match the search query, the click-through rate (how many people click your listing to go to your site) rises. Because you’re more likely to have what the user is looking for, your conversion rate (how many visitors actually purchase something, sign up, or take whatever action is appropriate on your site) rises.
Users of search engines are becoming savvier as time goes on, and they’ve learned that a single keyword search is likely to be too broad to return the results they’re looking for.
What happens when you search for security is a good example. You may require the services of a security guard, but a quick Google search with the keyword security yields results ranging from the Wikipedia article on security to the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and numerous listings for computer security software.
Using the phrase security guard service as a keyword Poughkeepsie, on the other hand, yields map results for local businesses, two local business sites for hiring security guards, and a couple of news articles about Poughkeepsie security services.
You can see why having proper keyword phrases, rather than single keywords, on your web pages is a good idea. Your keyword phrase Poughkeepsie classic car customization could be used as a heading for your paragraphs, in heading tags (HTML tags for paragraph headings), or as the title of your web page (using the title tag in the HTML code).
Use simple, everyday language that searchers are likely to type in. As a general rule, you should include multiple instances of each keyword phrase, enough to make them visible on the page without forcing them into your content. You want it to mention each keyword a couple of times while still sounding natural.
Furthermore, avoid using only general phrases; instead, include detailed descriptive words as well. If your keywords are too broad, they will most likely face too much competition from others who are targeting the same keywords. If your keywords are too specific, fewer people will search for them, resulting in fewer potential visitors.
It’s a balancing act with no hard and fast rules. You must find the right mix for your site by identifying the keywords that drive traffic that converts — in other words, you must put out the bait that attracts the right catch.
When inserting keywords into your website’s content, make sure the words surrounding them are also good, searchable keywords. For example, if your school specialized in Spanish courses, you might use keyword phrases like this:
- Learn Spanish in Madrid
- Spanish Language School in Madrid
- Spanish courses in Madrid
- Visit Madrid and learn Spanish
All of these can be used as paragraph headings or as links to their own pages.
Remember that search engines look for keywords in hypertext links (where clicking a word or phrase takes you to another page within the website) within the page, and using a search phrase within the hyperlink results in a higher search rank for that phrase.
Stop words (common words like the, a, to, if, who, and so on that serve to connect ideas but don’t add much meaning to your content) should still be included in your search phrases.
For several years, Google had removed stop words from its indexes, but they are now used to perform much more precise searches. Furthermore, you don’t want your website text to sound robotic — \”Come Spanish Spain Courses\”.
Instead, you want your website to sound like English; after all, your true readers are real people. You also don’t want to give the search engines the impression that you’re keyword stuffing; they want natural-sounding text, which includes full sentences.
Once you have selected your keywords, make sure they are also strategically placed in the page content. You want a decent distribution of keywords throughout a web page without making them too obvious or repetitive.
As a general rule, try to place each word from your keyword phrase within three sentences of one another on the same web page.
In order to make sure your keywords are easily found by the search engines, you also need to choose an appropriate HTML tag to surround each keyword phrase.
For instance, if you place a hyperlink around the keywords \”French Paris\” (with no space between French and Paris, and with both words capitalized), all of those keywords appear in blue, underlined writing on the Internet. Some search engines will even count this as two keywords (French and Paris).
Additional tips on article creation for SEO purposes:
- Google is looking for natural language; keep sentences between 20-30 words in length.
- Search engine robots are not very good at identifying what is most important on a web page. Make it clear for them by including keywords as headings and subheadings.
- Search engines don’t know what pictures are about. Include your main keyword in the file name or ALT text for each image you have displayed on a page.
- Don’t forget to link your pages to one another, especially if they are on different websites. Search engine robots are constantly combing the Internet looking for new links between web pages, and linking to other relevant pages also helps you rank higher in SERPs for those links.
- When possible, keep your website design simple and clean; remember, these search engine robots are not very smart. They don’t understand graphics or flashy CSS designs yet.
If you keep these rules of thumb in mind when creating content for your web pages or blog posts, you’ll gain valuable exposure through the search engines.