Ten Golden Rules For Effective Keyword Deployment

Effective keyword use is an art, not a science. Below we have listed Midphase’s recommendations for optimizing your site’s SEO, and ensuring customers can find you online, through a combination of diligent research and ongoing site management…

1. Investigate your market. Use Wikipedia, Reddit and Twitter to create a list of industry-specific words and related terms capable of attracting visitors to your site. Also investigate effective keyword use among your primary competitors.
2. Choose keyword research software with care. Don’t rely on the generic suggestions made by predictive tools like Google Keyword Planner. Identify related terms with KWFinder, Ahrefs or Google Analytics.
3. Incorporate keywords into body text and captions. Web designers often favor building graphical content into website design. However, search engine spiders can’t read the contents of photos, videos or animations. Stick to HTML text and captions/tags.
4. Don’t look for shortcuts. Lazy tricks such as tag clouds will be dimly viewed by Google and Bing, whose algorithms are constantly evolving to prioritize genuine content over SEO shortcuts.
5. Focus on long tails. Head keywords won’t drive much traffic, because few people search for a single word. Add geographic identifiers, industry terminology and action words like ‘sale’ to create four or five-word strings, known as long tails.
6. Use keywords sparingly. There’s no excuse for using long tails more than once in a paragraph, and even solo keywords (where their use is justifiable) shouldn’t be over-used. Ask friends and relatives to read web text, looking for excessive keyword use.
7. Minimize stop words. Although the search engines ignore words like ‘in’, ‘of’ and ‘but’, avoid cluttering long tails with these words. This article contains the phrase “effective keyword use” five times, optimizing clarity by cutting out extra words.
8. Write for people, not Google and Bing. Don’t shoehorn in long tails to impress search engines, because they’re pretty good at recognizing keyword stuffing. Effective keyword use involves writing for people, not trying to please an algorithm.
9. Add a blog or news page. Regular site updates boost SEO, and so does uploading content relating to current events or trending subjects. A blog or news page lets you increase keyword deployment without impacting on the site’s core pages.
10. Follow market trends. Once upon a time, hyperlink-based anchor text was a popular SEO technique. These days it’ll damage your site’s ranking. Read blogs and reports on keyword deployment techniques to ensure your own site isn’t behind the times…

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