Search engine optimisation
Using keywords to improve your search engine optimisation
Keywords are essential to ensuring that your site will be visible on search engines. Think about the terms and keywords that customers will use to search for your website and which keywords and key phrases best describe your products or services.
Using keywords
Choosing keywords is the most important step in building a search engine-friendly site. These keywords need to be specific to your product or service. The density of these keywords in your website will also impact on search engine results. Look at your competitor's website and see how they use keywords in their websites. The choice of keywords and the optimal keyword density are difficult to define, although there are tools available that can help you analyse this. Use keywords in your content, page titles, page headings, subheadings and in any metadata that is included in your page code.
Plain English works best
It's important to use real sentences rather than just keywords in your content, and never sacrifice the quality of your page to fit in more keywords. If you are found to be keyword stuffing ie using keywords indiscriminately in an attempt to improve page ranking, search engines will penalise you. See the page in this guide on search engine optimisation tactics.
Keep up to date on how your keywords are performing
In addition to doing the obvious searches on keywords to see where your site comes in the listings, most search engines allow sites to check their status in their indexes. You can use these to monitor your search position to see how changes affect your search rank, and to determine what keywords to add in future.
Subjects covered in this guide
- Introduction
- What is a search engine and how do they work?
- Design your site for search engine optimisation
- Using keywords to improve your search engine optimisation
- Submitting new websites to search engines
- Search engine optimisation tactics
- Working with a search engine optimisation agency
- Choosing a search engine optimisation agency
- Tracking your search engine optimisation results
