Keywords are words and phrases that web surfers put into search engines when they are looking for websites that cover particular topics or sell certain products. Search engines analyzing the content of the web pages and provide the best search results for these keywords, and that makes keywords the most important SEO element for every website.
Choosing the right keywords is the first and most important step to a successful SEO campaign, and not only that your keywords need to match the content of your page they also have to be the same keywords people are using to look for your website.
Achieving high rating for a "single word" keywords is nearly impossible and best practice is to use 2 or 3 words phrases that will place your website near the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Another major factor is selecting the "right" keywords is the Keyword Effectiveness Index that compares the number of times the keywords was used against the number of competing web pages, obviously one have to aim for a popular keyword with low competition.
obviously one have to aim for a popular keyword with low competition
How to use keywords
Now that you have got your keyword research started, you need to know where to put these keywords on your Web site and how often to use these keywords.
Keywords Placement
- Title Tag - This is one of the most important places to have a keyword because what is written inside the <title> tag is displayed in the search results as your page title.
- Keywords Meta Tag - not as important as it used to be but can still make a difference.
- URL - web page address, use friendly URLs that contain your keywords. (e.g. http://www.domain.com.au/about-keywords)
- Anchor text - is actually the link text and is an important keyword placement either on your web page or as link from another website.
- Headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc) tags - another place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword.
- Keywords in the beginning of a document - not as important as title or heading, place keywords close to the beginning of the document.
- Keywords in <alt> tags - spiders don't read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them.
- Keyword proximity - keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are. It is best if they are immediately one after the other (e.g. “dog food”), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have “dog” in the first paragraph and “food” in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase “dog food” without any other words in between. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.
- Synonyms - optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords. This is good for sites in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms as well
- Keyword Mistypes - spelling errors are very frequent and if you know that your target keywords have popular misspellings or alternative spellings (i.e. Christmas and Xmas), you might be tempted to optimize for them. Yes, this might get you some more traffic but having spelling mistakes on your site does not make a good impression, so you'd better don't do it, or do it only in the metatags.
- Keyword dilution - When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the text.
- Keyword stuffing - Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.
Keywords Density
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords.