Phantasmagoria: “An illusion, mirage or fantasy, often as seen in dreams.” Phantasmagoria sounds a bit like what we fall prey to when creating a web page: We imagine and hope that building keywords ever so carefully into our page will, as in a dream, bring us to nirvana: A Page One placement in the search engine results page (SERP) on Google, Yahoo or Bing.
However, it’s no surprise that the incorrect use of keywords will cause a site to be demoted by Panda and other search engine bots.
So what’s the best way to use keywords that will appeal to your customers and to the search engines? There’s really no magic to creating a good page. It’s more about common sense and delivering value to the consumer. Here are eight key recommendations…
- Remember that keywords are essential to getting decent SERP’s. Including your keyword in the page Title is a biggie. If your product is a Health Club, setup the title of your sales page to include “Health Club.”
- Including your keyword in the URL is equally important. Be sure to setup your sales page for the Health Club with “/health-club” in the URL. Sites built with Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Dot Net Nuke or Joomla need special attention to achieve search engine friendly URL’s. Check your CMS documentation to learn how to make your page URL’s friendly to the spiders and bots.
- Use Headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) that include your keyword, which helps search engine spiders understand what your web content is all about.
- Make use of ALT tags on images and, again, use your keywords in those tags.
- Put your keyword for the page into its first 50 words . For example, your opening sentence might read: “Acme Health Club has 14 locations throughout the Chicago metro area.”
- Use a thesaurus to find synonyms for your keywords. Bots and spiders are smart enough to recognize that “health club” and “fitness center” refer to the same concept. Using synonyms makes your web content richer and more natural, and reduces the possibility of “stuffing” your page with too many identical keywords.
- Hire professional content writers . These are the professional writers, bloggers and web content writing services that provide top quality material specifically for your site. If you don’t have time to research, write the content and publish it, you can get first rate web content from those pros.
- Most important of all , remember that spiders and bots are software programs developed by people . Those people want to deliver search results that are extremely relevant and of excellent quality. So whether you write your own web content or hire professional content writers, make sure your writing is “natural,” grammatically correct and delivers real value to the reader. Don’t worry about achieving three, four or eight percent keyword density. You’ll make your site look good to the bots by following these simple guidelines. In the process you’ll make it look good to humans as well.
Allan R is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch.
