Fifteen places you must put your Keyword Phrase and the why behind it…

by Jim Morris

Welcome to another direct, to the point and content rich edition of The Keyword Informer.

In this issue, we’re going to look at the various places you want to utilize and place your preferred keyword phrases.

I have already conveyed a number of the points that will follow in different articles, discussions, and especially in the weekly NicheBOT Quick Fix Clinic and Live Q&A Show. However, I was looking to create a combined list (a sort of checklist) that one can easily reference to make sure they are not missing any hotspots.

And rather than include a simple quick list of all the places to put your keyword phrases, I’ve included a short discussion as to the why behind it so you have the proper foundation in the placement of your keyword phrases.

Some of the following places are obvious, some of them may not be. Either way, I’ve included visual aids within this article as well for the next time you approach your next website renovation or promotional project.

Let’s get started.

1. Keyword phrases in your domain names - some may initially think this is for some huge SEO (search engine optimization) benefit to have the keyword phrase in your domain name. Wrongo!

As most of NicheBOT subscribers know, offpage factors that entail getting backlinks to a site can heavily outweigh any type of SEO benefit from having the keyword phrase in the domain name.

The main reason to have a keyword phrase in the domain name is that the 4th line of your search engine listing shows your domain name. Having a keyword phrase as part of your domain name can have a very big psychological pull on web surfers.

Sure — if you’ve got some good brand awareness like NicheBOT.com — it’s not all that necessary. But if you’re building out targeted travel sites for a specific region, then having a targeted domain name with specific geographic regions in the domain name can get the click at the search engine listing level before another domain name does.

Here’s a snapshot for the search engine listing for “dog toys”

2. Keyword phrases in the URL of your website pages – when creating a name for your web pages, rather than naming them with some number or some weird funky name, put your main keyword phrase in the URL, sort of like this…

There are two main benefits:

a. Once again, the fourth line in your search engine listing is your websites URL and there’s a psychological tug on the web surfer when they see the keyword phrase they typed into the search engine and then subsequently see the URL in your search engine listing.

Remember, you are competing against nine other sites on the search engine listings page as well as multiple Pay-Per-Click ads on either of the big search engines.

Having the keyword phrase in your URL provides additional relevance that your search engine listing is what the web surfer is looking for.

b. Should you submit an article to article directories, there are some that do not happen to allow keyword phrases to act as anchor text in a hyperlink back to your site. What they end up doing is using the URL back to your site as the hyperlink. Since you have the main keyword phrase in your URL which gets turned into a hyperlink, you will get credit for that keyword phrase in the backlink to your site.

In the screenshot sample above, NicheBOT would get credit for the term “market research.” Oh, and you want to make sure and place a hyphen “-” between the words in your keyword phrase of your URL.

3. Keyword phrases in the <title> tags of your web pages – this is probably the most important place on your web page to place your keyword phrase and secondary keyword phrases. Why?

a. It’s the top line of your search engine listing and what sets the tone of your search engine listing.

b. This is a primary indicator to the search engines that you are optimizing this specific web page for the keywords in the title tag.

Some like to stuff keywords into the title tag. I like to create the title tag as if it’s a headline in my copy for the web page. Naturally, it’s the top line of the search engine listing and most likely the first thing the web surfer will read.

The main thrust of your search engine listing should be geared toward getting the click. That’s it. Here’s a sample…

All your title tags should different from web page to web page, just as each web page varies in its keyword focus.

In order to optimize the clickthrough rate of your search engine listing, you can test your title tag by changing it and checking your logs (or Google Analytics account) to see how many more or less clicks you get.

When you decide to test your title tag, be sure to look daily at when the top line of your search engine listing changes so you can log the date to begin your testing and refer to your website’s traffic logs.

4. Keyword phrase in the meta description tag – when a visitor enters a keyword into a search engine and gets results back, search engines tend to highlight the keyword phrases to mark relevance to the visitor’s search.

The meta description tag on each of web page ends up being the 2nd and 3rd line of your search engine listing (or, alternatively, the first sentence extracted from the actual web page). Any relevant keywords in this tag will also get highlighted for a web surfer in your search engine listing.

This is yet another psychological component of your search engine listing and using keywords in the tag could impact your visitor clicking on your listing rather than the others located on the page.

In the meta tag description, I usually construct a more descriptive sentence using the main keyword phrase that flows from the title tag and gives a little more detail to the visitor needed to get them to click over and check out the target web page.

The meta tag description is expressed like this in your web page:

<meta name=”description” content=”Keyword rich descriptive content here”>

You may want to make some convincing statements in this meta description tag. I’ve seen some people that even use their phone number and a strong price guarantee.

5. Keyword phrase in the first sentence of the first paragraph of your page – another great way to optimize each web page for a search engine besides including the keyword phrase in your <title> tag and meta description tag would be to include your keyword phrase in the first sentence of your first paragraph.

6. Keyword phrases sprinkled throughout the body of copy on a web page – you want to have a conservative sprinkling of the main keyword you are focusing on throughout the web page and use other related keyword phrases that may be naturally occurring when discussing the topic of your main keyword phrase.

This is a great time to use NicheBOT’s 1-Click LSI tool that will find a number of related keyword phrass that may be worthy to bring up in a particular web page.

I believe it’s safe to stay within a keyword density range of 1%-3%. That is, how many times your keyword phrase appears throughout the body of copy. One percent keyword density would mean that the keyword phrase would show up once for every 100 words on a web page.

However, I personally put more focus on writing the page first for the web visitor in mind. I then go back and put focus on making sure the web page is optimized for the keyword without overdoing the sprinkling of keyword phrases throughout the entire copy on the page.

7. Keyword Phrases in your site’s Navigation – there are still so many websites I come across that use the word “Home” in the hyperlink that is part of their site’s navigation back to the home page.

Just as you would use a keyword phrase in an external hyperlink pointing toward your website that would count as a backlink, why not use a keyword rich link in your website’s navigation pointing to an interior page? This helps tell the search engines what that interior page, or home page, is about.

You’ll notice on NicheBOT’s home page that instead of using just the word “Home” for the link back to the home page, we preface the word “Home” with the keyword phrase “Keyword Research” to make it “Keyword Research Home.” This tells the search engines that the home page is relevant to “keyword research” and not just the word “home.”

Make an audit of your navigation and find a way, if possible, to place a one or two word phrase that gives the web page the link is pointing to more relevance. And if you happen to be using images that are part of your sites navigation, it may be time to consider a site redesign or find a way to turn those images into text using CSS (cascading style sheets).

8. Keyword phrases used in hyperlinks in the body of your copy pointing to internal pages of your site – similarly discussed in the point number 7, if you have a web page on your site focused around a keyword phrase and you want to reference another internal web page somewhere in the body of your copy, use a keyword phrase in the hyperlink pointing to that internal web page.

In fact, use a keyword phrase that is relevant to the focus of the web page you are pointing that internal hyperlink to. The keyword phrase you choose to use in that hyperlink pointing to the internal page will give that page more relevance in the eyes of the search engines.

9. Keyword phrases in the links pointing back from your articles – this is an obvious one for some, but I still look through Ezine Articles and still see a lot of authors just using their site URLs with no keyword phrases in their hyperlinks pointing back to their sites. What a shame! Why not get credit for a backlink, ya know?

I also see a lot of hyperlinks that point in toward the home page and the home page only. Another mistake!

As you can see from the screenshot below, I like to use at least two links to two different pages. And since I know that I have plenty of links pointing at NicheBOT’s home page, both the links on the screenshot below are pointing to internal pages.

What I also like to do is rotate a whole variety of keyword phrases in the hyperlinks (resource box) shown above. This gives some keyword phrase variation when submitting one article to a number of different directories.

I always talk about alleviating patterns where possible. Search engines look for commonly recurring patterns. And an easy pattern to catch would be using the same keyword phrase over and over in the same article submitted to many article directories.

Some article directories even allow you to place HTML hyperlinks with anchor text (keyword phrases) right in the body of the article, but you should check on the rules of each individual article directory if that’s allowed.

I just recently received notice from Ezine Articles that they will soon be allowing authors to submit articles with just two self-serving links within each article, rather than four.

The optimum way to submit articles and make sure they stick through duplicate content filters is to find software that allows you to re-write certain portions of an article. I have found one such site called SubmitYourArticle.com.

10. Keyword phrases in the links pointing back from your press releases – another great place to use keyword phrases and a way to get some keyword rich inbound links to your site is using press release distribution.

If you can spare the extra expense, and it’s well worth it, you’ll want to use the SEO enhanced submission that PR Web Direct allows you to use. They allow you to use 1 keyword rich hyperlink for every 100 words in your press release.

So if you have a 900 word press release, you can easily get 9 keyword rich hyperlinks pointing back to 9 different pages on your website using your preferred keyword phrases.

That’s powerful if you ask me and since PR Web is a highly spidered web site and they have great distribution channels, you’ll get a good number of inbound links from just one distributed press release.

Besides that, whoever ends up viewing your press release online can jump directly from your press release through one of those keyword rich hyperlinks directly to the relevant page of interest to them. Talk about instant gratification!

11. Keyword phrases used in your blog commenting efforts – another great way to place keyword phrases and get inbound links to your site(s) that get you credit in the search engines is commenting on blogs that are designated as “do follow.”

“Do follow” blogs are blogs that do not use “no follow” tags. “No follow” tags do not give you credit for a backlink to your site, but you can still receive indirect website traffic from the blog itself.

When commenting on a blog, you’ll fill out the “Name,” “URL,” “Email” and “Comment” portion of the form on a blog. When entering your name, you’ll use your first name with a dash and a keyword phrase. In other words, something like this:

Name: Jim – keyword research

Whatever URL you enter in the URL field, the”Name” field will turn into the keyword rich hyperlinked text.

Some blog commenters end up using a hyperlink within the body of their comment, and that may be the wrong etiquette to use when commenting on a blog. So the best thing to do would be to see how other commenters are allowed to hyperlink to their site and proceed accordingly.

12. Keyword phrases in your forum signature file – another great way to use your keyword phrases and gain inbound links from your helpfulness on forums is to have keyword rich hyperlinks pointing to your sites from your signature file. Like so…

Not only is it a great way to promote your site, but the search engines will follow your keyword rich hyperlinks and give you credit for the backlink.

By having more identities in more forums and using various keyword phrases, you’ll gain more search engine power from your keyword rich hyperlinks.

Of course, if you use a tracking URL that redirects visitors to the target web page so you can track how many clicks you get from a forum, then you will not get credit for a backlink from the search engines. However, you can just as easily track clicks from forums by looking at your website’s traffic logs or by using Google Analytics.

13. Keyword phrases in your Pay-Per-Click ads – another place to have your keyword phrases show up is in your PPC ad campaigns. This is usually done by what’s called “phrase matching.”

This is another hypnotic element that can trigger a web surfer to click on your Pay-Per-Click ad versus another ad on the page.

Prior to drawing any conclusions, the best way to measure the true validity of this is to test it for yourself.

14. Keyword phrases in the titles and tags of your Video Submissions – much like the title tag of your site which becomes the first line of your search engine listing, the Title of your video will become the first line of your search engine listing. So you definitely want to get your keyword phrase and a secondary keyword phrase in there like so:

In the video submission form of the site you submit to, you’ll also have a chance to put keywords in as tags that will allow your video to be categorized for it’s specific genre.

Without a doubt, the most important place to put your keyword phrase is in the title of your video.

15. Keyword phrases in your bookmarked URLs – and last but not of least importance is making sure to include a keyword phrase when bookmarking your own URLs to social bookmarking sites such as digg.com and others.

Social bookmarking can give some really quick search engine benefits and increased rankings in the immediate future. So you’ll want to use your primary keyword phrase in the title of your bookmarked items.

While there may be “no follow” tags in place at a good number of the social bookmark sites, there is still evidence that indicates that search engines do follow the links and this helps for fast indexing of web sites.

Should you write some really sticky content that gets bookmarked a lot — you can easily climb in the rankings of the actual site’s internal search structure that can bring you a flood of website traffic. This is also known as the “digg effect.” As a side note, these social bookmarking sites are great for research on popular articles and the keywords being used.

Places NOT to use your Keyword Phrases

You’ll notice that through out this article, I did not mention anything about using your keyword phrases in your meta keyword tags as well as alt text in your images. Here’s why.

Meta keyword tags are pretty much worthless to the large search engines. While they are still used in very minor search engines, this does not warrant the time or effort to focus your energies on this aspect of your web page. Furthermore, when you use your keyword phrases in your meta tags, this allows other webmasters to conduct keyword research right from your own site as they use site scrapers that pull keywords right from your meta tags.

Alt text in images tend to be a place that webmasters stuff keywords repetitively and search engines nowadays frown upon this. Why take the chance in getting your web page penalized for over-stuffing keywords when there are so many places noted above to put your keyword phrase? It’s probably best to use various alt text in your images that relate to exactly what the image is about. This begs you not to use the same keyword phrase over and over again just to try and improve your search engine rankings.

Now that you’ve got the full scoop of where to place your keyword phrases and where not to, it’s time to put this to good use. In fact, print this out.

You may perhaps even want to go over your future plans for articles, press releases, blog commenting and also go back over your web pages and re-optimize them accordingly.

As I discover more and more places to properly put your keyword phrases, I’ll continually update this article as a central depository. However, I believe I got the main ones.

If you feel I’ve missed some hotspots, please let me know by leaving your comment below and we’ll add to it.

Even if you feel I’ve covered the most important ones, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article below.

Thanks so much for reading through the end and make sure to tell a friend.

See you on the next issue.

Best of success,

Jim Morris, Founder

NicheBOT – “Finds exactly what people search for.”