Good Organic SEO Practices: Keywords Part 1:

by | Jun 21, 2016 | SEO

good organic search engine optimisation

Good Organic SEO Practices: Keywords Part 1:

It is a very happy “Hi” from me at WebScripto. I have unfortunately not written a blogpost for a long time but I am very happy to say that I have been very busy and blessed with a lot of work.

I had to look at my previous blog article to remember what I have planned for this article. It appears that we were busy with SEO and that I have promised to write a bit on Organic SEO. As explained in my previous blog, organic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategies are normally strategies that can be implemented on your website directly by yourself, or during the development of the website and the development of further content thereafter. This will enhance your website’s visibility during searches on search engines. It is the stuff that makes your website stand out from others without resorting to costly exercises or products.

Organic SEO Strategies:

With that out of the way, we now need to have a look at the various organic strategies available to us.

  1. Think like the customer:

Consider the search words (Keywords) that people will use to search for your products and/or services. Write down each of these possible keywords and save them. You can now make use of a tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner or a free alternative such as keywordtool to check the estimated traffic possible, for each keyword you have written down. You can eliminate some keywords during the process and create a shortlist of the keywords that generate the most estimated traffic. These keywords can then be utilised in various areas of your website’s content. Let’s say that I have found the word “keyword” to be an effective search word. Can you see how many times I have used it in this paragraph. The good use of a keyword is good for any website. Overusing it as I have done above, may however count against us as search engines’ algorithms may identify this as excessive and misutilised (see paragraph 3 below).

  1. Concentrate your keywords:

We designers and developers like to coin new phrases in the industry from time to time. When we get low on energy and inspiration we borrow some word from unrelated industries. Let’s use the word “cornerstone” today. The “cornerstone principle” suggests that you do not use your identified keywords (see above) spread all over your website. The argument behind this principle is that search engines find it difficult to identify which page is more relevant on a website. Let’s say we have created a 5-page website and identified the word “ice cream” as the keyword. Let’s further say that one page is dedicated to the origin of ice cream whilst you are running an ice cream delivery store (good concept). If you use the keyword 20 times on the history-of-ice-cream-page and only 14 times on your order-your-ice-cream-page the search engine may rank that history-page higher than your actual selling-page. You may just end up ensuring that everybody in the neighborhood is schooled properly. Your ice cream business though, “tsk, tsk”. The point here is to decide which page is the most important on your website and by using that page as a “cornerstone” you can merge your keywords into that “single cornerstone page”. This page will now rank higher with search engines and visitors will be directed to that specific page.

  1. Specific placement of keywords:

We have now decided to concentrate our keywords on our “cornerstone page”. The next consideration should be where to place it on the page and to consider how often we should use our keyword on that page. Due to the high ranking possibilities with related properly written text, it must be our objective to use our targeted keyword effectively in this area. Although you should never repeat your keyword/s at the expense of good writing it is advisable to repeat your keyword/s in your content 2-3 times for short pages. For longer pages it may be suitable to use the keyword/s up to 5-6 times. Early placement of keywords in your written content is also quite important as this will indicate relevance to search engines

  1. Content, content, content:

There is a saying that “content is king”. This holds true as search engines definitely pays attention to the content of website. Let’s quickly see how. Firstly, people like good content. Good content is much more likely to be shared by people than other content. Content sharing gets noticed by search engines. It is well known that Google rewards viral content heavily in its rankings algorithm. Content however consists of much more than just written content. Although written content is extremely important and the layout thereof is picked up by search engines it is very important to add other quality content such as images, videos, infographics and others. Guess which of the content gets shared the most?

In this article we have looked at and considered 4 SEO strategies relating to the good use of proper and relevant keywords. In our next article, we will look at 5 more focused uses of keywords. These are normally used by the website designer/developer but you may benefit from this if you happen to know how to get access to your websites HTML codes without breaking up your website.

Until next time, take care.

Eitel Bock

Eitel Bock
Latest posts by Eitel Bock (see all)