SEO Copy – Where should I use my keywords?

October 11, 2006 • Glenn Murray

When assessing what your website is about, search engines pay close attention to the words you use in your text links and headings (and it’s also argued that they pay more attention to the copy at the top of the page than to the copy at the bottom of the page). So make sure your copy in these areas is keyword rich.

Using keywords in links

For both internal and external links, try to use your target keyword as the link text (the part that’s normally blue and underlined). For example, on your “Cheap Second Hand Macs” page, you could include a text link to “Cheap Second Hand PCs”.

Using keywords in headings

Just as customers rely on headings to scan your site, so to do search engines. This means headings play a big part in how the search engines will index your site. Try to include your keyword phrase in your headings. In fact, think about inserting extra headings just for this purpose. Generally this will also help the readability of the site because it will help customers scan read.

For example, if you have a page detailing the benefits of cheap second hand computers, you could break it up into logical sections with the following headings.

• “The cost benefits of cheap our second hand computers”
• “The technical benefits of our cheap second hand computers”
• “The support benefits of our cheap second hand computers”

Using keywords at the start of the page

Many SEO experts believe that the search engines see words at the start of a page as more representative of what your site is about than words at the end (i.e. prominence). So it’s a good idea to make sure you use your keywords toward the start of each page. This normally happens fairly naturally, anyway, so don’t put a lot of effort into making it happen.