SEO Lessons: Using Keywords

22/12/09 posted by Liz Niland

Continuing on from the first of our do-it-yourself Search Engine Optimisation lessons - SEO Lessons: Quality Content - this installment will be focused on the best way to use keywords to help improve your website’s overall ranking. 



Keywords refer to the words that you’d ideally like people to type into a search engine to find your site. For example, if you sell shoes, you may hope that people typing “women’s shoes” into Google will see a page from your website returned in the search results. While improving your search ranking requires the combination of a range of factors that are best handled by an SEO professional, understanding the best way to use keywords will assist you in maintaining the quality of the content on your website over time.

Just like finding the perfect amount of text for your website that helps your SEO without diminishing the power of the web design, the balance of keywords in your web content has to walk a fine line. Too little, and you may not influence your site’s results. Use too many keywords though and you will either spread your site’s focus too thin, or get penalised for filling your website with spam. So, how do you make it work?

An important thing to realise with SEO is that optimisation should be considered on a page-by-page basis, rather than with a whole-site mentality. Search engines look for specific pages relevant to a user’s search results, not entire websites. With this in mind, your homepage should be optimised for the one or two keywords that you know to be the most popular or important for your online business. From there, the keywords chosen for your other pages should be focused on individual themes - such as "women's shoes" as we mentioned in the initial example.

SEO keywords can be a tricky thing to master successfully for your website so it’s worthwhile investing in professional assistance to get you started on the right foot.