Keyword Placement: SEO Best Practices

Why Is Keyword Placement Important For SEO?

Keyword placement is important for SEO because, with proper placement, you can ensure search engines and users alike can more easily understand your content. Once you understand keywords well enough to determine your primary keyword, your next step is properly placing the keywords you want to rank for. 

What Should You Keep In Mind When Placing Your Keywords?

When placing keywords, it is important to keep in mind that you need to do more than just pepper your primary keyword throughout your content. Quality, natural, high-authority content will use several variations of the primary keyword in natural ways. When writing the content for your pages, take some time to find short-tail versions, long-tail versions, and even synonyms of your main keyword that you can use throughout your content.

Where Should You Place Your Keywords?

Your target keywords need to appear in many places, and these are some of the most important places you should be aware of. In fact, the first three on the list below are the three most important places your keywords need to show up if you want to improve your chances of ranking.

Each place described below will be targeting our example keyword "organic dog food". We'll start off the places with the three most important places your keyword needs to appear, the URL, Title tag, and H1.

URLs

URLs are considered one of the three most important places to put your main keyword. URLs are important to contain your primary keywords because crawlers will see the URL structure of your pages first. If they don't deem the URLs relevant enough, they will not continue crawling the other URLs in your structure.

Title Tags

Title tags are considered one of the three most important places to place your keywords. Title tags are essential for many reasons, but one of the most important reasons is your CTR. A proper title tag should convey the central focus of the page while also enticing users to click through to learn more.

H1 Tags

H1 tags are considered one of the three most important places to include your keywords. H1 tags, also called "root" headings, help search engines determine the main topic of the webpage. If you want to rank for a topic, ensure that you help search engines determine that your page is focused on that topic by including it in your H1 tag.

You can have multiple H1 tags, but having only one will make your page more efficient and cheaper to rank because less resources will be used to determine the true context of your page.

However, if you use multiple H1 tags - while you won't be penalized for it - search engines will have to use more resources to weigh each H1 tag against the rest of the content on the page. This process is to help them determine the main point of your page so that a "root" heading can be chosen from the multiple H1 tags. Because of this extra process, your website will be more expensive to rank than it needs to be and can potentially cause you to forfeit ranking potential.

Meta-Descriptions

Meta-descriptions are less important than the other items on our list, and you can rank fine without even having a meta-description. Even if you create the most compelling and optimized meta-description possible, if Google deems it necessary, they will replace it with text from your website that is more relevant to a user's query.

Meta descriptions are still included in this list because they will help users click through to your website if you create and structure this piece of text well enough.

Headings

Headings are incredibly important places to have your keywords because they help users and search engines understand how relevant your page/sections are to the root heading (h1 heading). In addition to conveying the relevance to the page's main topic, it also helps to express the page's structure more clearly. Being explicit about what each section is talking about will make it easier for users and search engines alike to understand your pages.

Paragraph Tags

Keyword placement in paragraph tags is very important. Search engines expect that you will be consistent. So, when your heading mentions a specific keyword and an even more specific context around that keyword, the text in your paragraph tags must further expand upon the heading text. The best way to do this is to write quality, in-depth content under each heading. You'll generally want to include your keyword throughout your paragraphs wherever relevant, natural, and useful.

Image Alt Tags

Image alt tags are mainly used to convey the purpose of an image to those with accessibility issues. You don't always need to include your keywords in alt tags, but if it is useful, relevant, and makes sense to do so, do it.

Links

Links are an interesting concept in keyword placement because it can improve the relevance of both pages at the same time, even though they both focus on different topics. Typically, however, you'll want to use keyword synonyms that the page being linked to is targeting. But, ideally, you can do so in a way that further expands upon the text surrounding the link.

List Items

Lists aren't used often, but when relevant and useful, including keywords in them is a great way to improve the connection and relevance to the keyword(s) you're targeting.

Tables

Table elements are great places to utilize keyword placement because tables are a form of semi-structured data. Search engines most clearly understand structured data and semi-structured data. Most content on websites is neither, so whenever you can increase the amount of semi-structured or structured data on your website in any way, you will increase the level and quality of communication with the search engines. Increasing and improving this communication is a large part of what will improve your rankings.

So the code snippet above creates the table below.