Creative Connections

For the purposes of this article when I use the term Keyword I will be referring to either a single word or a number of words that make up a key phrase.

The first thing to be clear with here is that Google does not use the Keywords meta tag for search engine ranking as confirmed in this official Google article link.

However, it is still critical to identify your keywords and phrases and understand how you are going to use them for your site SEO.

You should build a list of as many keywords and phrases as you feel necessary,. I normally work on a basis of 1 or 2 keywords per page as I find that this makes it much easier to manage them for reasons that will become clear. 

To help you identify the best possible keywords I use another free Google resource, the Adwords Keyword tool. This does require you to create a basic Adwords account, but do not worry - you do not have to actually create or run any adverts. The tool is fantastic and allows you to enter keywords and gives you the following analysis of those keywords:

• Total number of times a keyword has been searched globally
• Total number of times a keyword has been searched locally
• Level of competition for a keyword
• Alternative keywords

Having identified my keywords, I then allocate them to a page and then make sure that they are included within the page title, this is very important as Google does use the page title for SEO purposes (my next blog will cover the page title in detail).

I then try to ensure that the keywords are included within the text for the allocated page with a keyword density of between 2 to 4 %.

Keyword Density

This is the number of times a keyword appears in relation to the total number of words on the page. Where possible and appropriate I like to have pages of at least 250 to 300 words but preferably 400 to 500 words. So in order to ensure that my keyword density is around the 2 to 4 % mark, I use the following equation:

 (Number of Instances of keyword / Total number of words) x 100 = Keyword density

It is perfectly ok to have as many words as you like on your page, just try and keep a good keyword density.

Do not over use your keywords on a page as this is seen as Keyword stuffing and certainly will not help your SEO efforts.

If you follow my SEO blogs you will see a constantly recurring message that I want to drive home and that is that the best way to achieve good search engine ranking is to create quality content that is accurately described and presented to both the end user and the search engines.

All search engines want to give their users the most accurate search results possible based on the search term the user has entered. One way that the search engines can ensure this is by ranking websites on the quality of the content on a page and the accuracy of the information used to inform the search engines about the page. 

I believe that one of the trickiest parts of SEO is writing content that is both interesting and readable for your target audience and at the same time optimised to ensure that your pages rank as highly as possible.

Finally, for many Keywords there is heavy competition so try to find keywords that are as specific to your purposes as possible but at the same time are actually going to be searched on (the Google Adwords Tool will help you with this).

My next blog will look at how to use your keywords to make the best use of the Page Title for your web pages.