Getting the Most Out of Keywords

Targeting the right keywords is arguably the most important part of any SEO methodology. What to do with or, better yet, how to optimize for those keywords is "1B" in terms of importance. Below are helpful recommendations to consider when optimizing for your targeted keywords.

• Forget about and remove long keyword lists and/or "stuffed" keywords from your web pages. Search engines consider keyword stuffing spam. Meta keyword tags with dozens of keywords will not work either. Search engines do not consider this meta tag in ranking calculations and it's never seen by visitors or searchers.

• Optimize a web page for 1-2 keywords or keyword phrases so that you build more relevancy between the copy and the keyword versus many keywords assigned to one page.It is much easier to get high rankings if the web page is very relevant to the searched keyword.

• If you have multiple-pages targeting the same keywords, avoid cannibalization by placing links on all the secondary pages back to the page you most want ranking for the term/phrase using the primary keywords as the anchor text of those links.

• Add keyword modifiers and combine keyword variations in one sentence. For example, an optimized web page title for a San Francisco shoe store could read:

  Buy cool Puma sneakers in our sneakers shop in San Francisco.

• Don't be afraid to use your targeted keywords in the URLs of your web pages. Search engines do look at keyword-targeted domains. But don't obsess with the order of the words or go overboard by using too many keywords in the same URL.