A great website’s no good unless it gets lots of visitors and keywords are a really important way to help people find your site. There’s a bit of an art to getting the perfect amount of keywords in just the right place – but let us help you get it right!
What are keywords anyway?
When customers are looking for a business, service or product using a search engine they enter a phrase describing what they are looking for, known as a ‘keyword’ or ‘query’, into a search engine, which then generates a list of websites containing that keyword. The results are often referred to as ‘SERPS’ – search engine results pages.
Search engines send ‘spiders’ to visit websites, which crawl through the pages looking to see what keywords are contained in the text and HTML code. This means that you want to make sure that your web pages contain the keywords that your target audience are searching for, so that the spider remembers and calls up your site if someone makes a relevant search.
The joy of keywords
Common keywords – like ‘shoes’ or ‘food’ – will generate literally billions of websites. The ideal situation is for your website to appear on the first page of results, since internet searchers are unlikely to look beyond the first couple of pages. For a small site, appearing on the first page of the search engine listings can be extremely difficult for competitive terms – but there are ways around this.
There are search terms which are less competitive, meaning that fewer websites are trying to appear for them – but they could help you attract exactly the kind of visitor your site was built for. For example, the website of a Dorset youth club’s football team might not appear at the top of the listings when someone searches for ‘football club’, but will appear if someone searches for ’Dorset youth football'. As the internet searcher is probably under 18, in the Dorset area and keen to practice their footie skills, there is a very good chance they are going to want the service the club offers.
How many keywords?
Search engine spiders check for something called ‘keyword density’ – how often a keyword appears on a webpage. They will get suspicious if, for example, every other word is ‘youth football’. You want to aim for a keyword to appear a few times on a page, but not too much. The perfect ratio is that your keyword makes up between three and 7% of the total text. Consider what your visitors will think – the website is primarily for them, not the engines, so focus chiefly on writing good and useful content, with the chance to get a cheeky keyword in an added bonus!
Position the keywords well
Search engine spiders always read from the top of the web page, and so recognise the content in the header as important – so your keyword should also appear in the web page’s header text (this is the bar that goes across the top of your website), as well as any paragraph titles and image descriptions.
So, on our imaginary youth club’s home page, they should include the phrase ‘Dorset youth football’ in their header and page titles.
Keywords and Mr Site
With a Mr Site package, it’s easy to add your keywords not only into your text but into your headers and image tags, using our ‘META tag’ tool. But if you ever have any questions – just get in touch and we’d love to give you further advice!