Keywords are an essential part of any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Search engines such as Google use spiders to crawl through websites in search of keywords, and when a site contains unique keywords with great keyword density, these websites will rank higher on the search engines.

 

Some companies make the mistake in thinking that keywords should only be found in the actual content of the website, but this is not the case. There are many other places that you can use keywords to help improve your SEO, and the following are just a few of these hidden gems.

• URLs

Keywords found in the URL of a website are much more beneficial than keywords found in the body copy. If you are creating your company’s website, make sure that the URL you choose contains keywords that describe your company. For example, if you sell shoes, you’re better off choosing a URL such as ShoeWarehouse.com than you would be choosing WalkThisWay.com.

This is also true of your blog posts. If your company has a blog, make sure that the URLs for each blog contain keywords. WordPress will automatically default to using the title of your blog, but you always have the ability to change it if you want to. The more keywords your URLs contain, the more beneficial they’ll be to you.

This doesn’t mean that you should hoard keywords in your URL if it’s not natural. For example, if you were to have that same shoe company, don’t choose a URL like ShoesBootsSandalsStilettosWarehouse.com just because it contains multiple keywords. It may have the keywords, but your customers will have a hard time remembering it.

• File Names

Make sure that all the file names for your website are also labeled with strong keywords. If you combine these file names with a strong keyword-rich domain name, they will be extremely beneficial.

Using keywords in file names is easier for most companies because file names are easier to change than domain names. So if your company already has a known URL that you can’t change to incorporate keywords, make sure the file names for your site have them.

• Page Titles

Make sure that keywords are also incorporated into page titles. Most people usually ignore this step because it’s not mandatory, but including keywords in this section will greatly help your SEO. If you don’t include keywords, it will just come up as “untitled”, which will not do anything for your SEO efforts.

The nice thing about page titles is that there is no character limit, so you can place as many organic keywords as you want in the page title. This means that your keywords should flow naturally and should not just be a list of random keywords.

• Headings

If your website content contains headings, make sure that these headings contain keywords. If you don’t typically write content with headings, you may want to start for the sake of your SEO.

The content in headings is read before content in the body copy of your website, so including keywords in these locations will have a better affect on your SEO efforts than having keywords listed throughout your body copy.

• Alt Tags

Alt tags can be found on images, and like page titles, many people skip over adding content to these, and this hurts your SEO efforts. Alt tags are also read by search engine spiders, and if your alt tag contains strong keywords, it will greatly improve your efforts. Again, you should try and make your keywords as organic as possible instead of in list format, but if you opt to list them, don’t use more than five or search engines will consider it spam.

So when it comes to your use of keywords to improve your SEO efforts, make sure you’re including them in these hidden locations as well as throughout your body copy. When your site is well equipped with keywords, you’ll see more SEO success.

 

This is a guest post by Caleb Grant from SEOMAP – the keyword strategy experts.