Keyword Placement Basics – The 6 Best Places to Include Your Keywords
Chances are you already know about keywords and might have already identified the best keywords for your website or blog. If this is not the case, read our complete guide to keyword research and come back to this page.
This article helps you understand why a title tag placement has a higher impact than a footer placement and highlights the best keyword placement opportunities on your website.
To recap the essence of keywords, they carry information about your content and the purpose of your website. They help search engines categorize your pages and decide whether they are a matching source of information for their users.
Since well above 90% of internet users prioritize Google as their search platform, this article is focusing on the best keyword placement methods to boost your Google rankings. If your business is more interested in ranking on alternative search platforms, check out these great articles on Bing and DuckDuckGo.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the topic and examine the 6 most important places on a webpage for keyword placement.
1. Keyword Placement in Title Tag
The title is the most authoritative place to have your keyword phrase. This is the first thing that shows up on the SERP (search engine result page), the first thing viewers notice, and it is also visible in browser tabs.
The order of words also matters in the title tag. You want to put your keyword phrase at the beginning of the title unless you want to rank for your own unique brand name. For example, the page title Bitbooms Digital Marketing – Local SEO Service does worse for the keyword phrase “Local SEO” than Local SEO Service in Florida | Bitbooms.
Length is also an important factor for title tags. Notice, how the second example only has “Bitbooms” at the end, even though the available number of characters would allow typing “Bitbooms Digital Marketing”. Google restricts the length of titles it displays on the SERP by pixels; therefore, it is recommended to use no more than 60-65 characters per title tag.
2. SERP Title and Meta Description in Google
By editing your SERP title and meta description, you can customize how your page will be displayed on Google’s result page.
The SERP title is the more important element of the two, as it directly influences your position in the search results. If you have a good title tag that includes your keyword phrase, editing this snippet might not be necessary. However, you can play with the order of the words, highlight your keyword phrase with full capital letters or use any other intuitive approach to grab the viewer’s attention.
The meta description is displayed under the title in one or two lines of text. A common misconception regarding the meta description is that it influences the result page position, but it is false. Including or excluding your keyword phrase here, won’t affect how high you’re ranking, but optimizing the meta description is still important and recommended.
If you don’t set a meta description, Google will pull text snippets from your page to fill the blank space. It can be the first sentence of your first paragraph or the titles from the menu anchor. Well, basically anything. You don’t want that to happen, as you want to grab the viewers’ attention with the description. Chances are your direct competition will have similar SERP titles for the same keyword phrase. In this competitive landscape, a well-formulated meta description with a call-to-action can be the difference and make people click on your link.
3. Header Text
The Google search engine understands the hierarchy of HTML text and learns from it when it crawls your webpage. In this hierarchy, headers are prioritized over body text. Header tags rank from H1 to H6 with H1 being the most authoritative.
A common mistake some people make is using different headers only for formatting text size. When this happens, the H1 tag (which is the most important one for keyword placement) usually appears more than once on the same page. This confuses the search engine and can lead to improper indexing of that said page, consequently, the H1 tag should only appear once on each page.
The H1 tag should be placed at the top of your page and should include your keyword phrase, preferably at the beginning. You can use the other header tags (H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) to further format your text where you can add your keyword phrase as well. FYI, Google does not differentiate header tags other than H1. This means, an H6 keyword won’t be less effective than an H2 keyword, although they can look different on the front-end due to formatting.
4. Body Text
The body is the main part of your article, and it usually contains 80-90% of the text on your page. When Google crawls your page, the algorithm thoroughly investigates each sentence, so it is recommended to use your keyword phrase at least 2-3 times.
Regarding keyword usage, there are some basic principles you should note. First and foremost, you should avoid stacking and overusing keywords. If you include your keyword phrase in every single sentence, Google will penalize your webpage and you will most likely not gain places but drop in the search rankings.
Here, we suggest a method that we refer to as smart keyword placement. The basic principles are the following:
- Use your keywords naturally. Don’t try to force them into sentences, where they don’t fit. Place them conveniently here or there and focus on writing a killer copy.
- Make a list of synonyms, antonyms, and variations of your keywords. Use these variations across the text to avoid sounding repetitive
- Try to use formatted text here or there, such as bold expressions or a bulleted paragraph like this. Google prioritizes formatted text if it is not overused.
5. Hyperlinks and URL
Try to incorporate useful links pointing to other websites. The best is to find links with your keyword in them, which gives your ranking a slight boost. Google prioritizes content that is good and useful for the reader. If you link to relevant, useful pages helping your reader, your SERP placement will benefit from it.
If possible, include your keyword to the page name, which is crawled by robots and will be displayed after the / in the URL. In the same way, if relevant, you can use your keyword in the URL path as well. For the keyword phrase ‘keyword placement’ it could look something like bitbooms.com/keyword-placement/beginners-guide.
6. Keyword Placement in Images
Before uploading any pictures to your webpage or blog post, make sure the actual file name includes your keyword phrase. For example, the image above this paragraph is named keyword-placement-guide.webp.
It is also important to specify the alt tags. First, the alt tag is very helpful for people with sight impairment. Besides, if a browser cannot show an image, it will display the alt tag instead, making it possible for people to understand what’s going on. In the case of alt tags, the best is to describe what the image is about and incorporate your keyword phrase into the description.
7. Keyword Placement for Web3 and Blockchain Webpages
Since more and more web3, blockchain, or crypto businesses appear on the internet in 2022, it is crucial to position your web pages in front of the eyeballs of your target audience – right on the first page of Google. Competition for keywords with a high search volume is fierce, consequently, you cannot afford to not optimize your website for keywords such as “blockchain services”, “discord community building”, or “crypto marketing”.
The peculiarities of blockchain, crypto, or web3-related websites have a lightweight design, a small number of pages, and heavy use of image and video content. Due to their specificity, these websites focus the visitor’s attention on the homepage, therefore, it is recommended to place your most significant keywords there in the page’s title tag, meta description, H1 tag, and body text as well.
In the case of web3 and blockchain-related websites, the vast majority of keywords are either informational or transactional keywords. The former category contains keywords where the search intent is to gain information, while the latter category contains keywords where the search intent is to buy/subscribe to a specific product or service.
If you are targeting a number of different transactional keywords, build dedicated pages around each of them and interlink them to your homepage. For informational keywords, it is recommended to publish blog posts or articles and place your keywords in the appropriate H-tags and the body text.
Thank you for sticking with us until the end of this guide, hope you found it helpful! If you have any questions or need any assistance, feel free to message us or email us at bertalan@bitbooms.com.