Selecting the right keywords to emphasize on your site is crucial to your website optimization. There are plenty of “thou shall nots” that search engine optimizers seem to break constantly, simply because they don’t realize that keyword spamming is an actual penalty that will cause their site to get booted right out of the search engines’ index. Here are some of the things you can check and do to ensure your on-page keywords don’t trip the spam filter and are working most effectively for your site’s optimization.
Thou shall not guess. Don’t guess your keywords, know exactly which terms are more popular: Plural or singular versions? Two words or one word (i.e. hard ware or hardware)? With or without suffixes (ship or shipping)? A good research will also yield common misspellings and synonyms you may have overlooked. Suggested research methods: 1. Use a keyword tool. 2. Ask/interview your customers. 3. Brainstorm with your sales team. 4. Look at your server “referrer or hit” logs.
Though shall not choose overly generic keyword phrases. Let’s say you are a manufacturing site of shoes for various sporting games. Do not optimize for the single keyword “shoes,” - that’s way too broad. Even “sports shoes” is too broad. Instead, look for words that reveal the searcher’s intent to purchase, such as “buy athletic shoes” or “athlete’s shoe store,” or intent to narrow down their choices, such as “best shoes for basketball athletes.”
Though shall not optimize for only one phrase per page. You don’t want to dilute the focus of a website page by mentioning too many diverse keywords; don’t go to the other end of the spectrum and select just one phrase. Ideally, you should pick three to 4 phrases that are fairly similar to each other. That will make it easier to get some variety in your copy.
Thou shall not commit redundancy. You can always tell when keyword-rich copy was written by someone who knows just enough about keywords to be dangerous: It will sound funny. It takes “wording finesse” to work in the keywords without going overboard. Notice the difference between the normal sales copy and the redundant one. The normal sales copy: “Looking to buy athletic shoes? We have the best shoes for athletes of all ages. So no matter what type of active footwear you’re currently in the market for, ZEY Shoes wants to be your family’s athletic shoe store.” The redundant copy: “Looking to buy athletic shoes? We have the best athletic shoes for athletes of all ages. So no matter what type of athletic shoes you’re looking for, ZEY Athletic Shoes wants to be your family’s athletic shoe store.” If you are to read out loud the latter copy, you’ll sure realize how awkward and contrived it sounds. You won’t choose to massacre your sales copy that way for you really don’t need to repeat your key phrases that often.
Thou shall not repeat the same keywords on every single page. Search engines “crawl” or check each page of a website as a “single site,” so each page should have its own specific keywords. Hence, thou shall not put on the site’s main page all of the keywords you have chosen for the entire website.But there is an exception to this, in the case of website home pages which serves as hub to all the inner pages. For instance, if your site sells mobile phones, the text on the home page will probably want to mention the various types and models of phones. That is fine, as long as you link each keyword mention to the landing pages selling the phone model.
To sum up everything , the search engine gods might deign to index your site in the result page if you do proper keyword research and choose the terms that reveal your intent but aren ’t too comprehensive and are used intelligently in your copy. The aforementioned keyword commandments are something to hold on to if you are serious about your website optimization.