Once you have determined the best targeted key phrases with which to optimize your website, you need to concentrate on writing your content. Below are the best practices, which, if followed explicitly, should increase visibility in the SERP (search engine results pages) for your site with your targeted key phrases. The first few practices involve the naming of your pages (URLs) and menu items, and the remainders are recommendations for optimizing each page of content:
Keyword Targeted URLs
Depending on your CMS (content management system) you should be able to alias each page URL to include your targeted key phrase (www.yourwebsite.com/section-targeted-keyphrase/). This practice of including your key phrase into the relevant page’s URL is an indicator to the search engines that you believe this phrase to be relevant to the page.
Keyword Targeted Menu Items
You should use your targeted key phrase in your menu items, or navigation to your site. By putting these phrases into your architecture you are indicating to the search engines (and to your visitors) that you believe this phrase is relevant to the section or page of your site.
Title Tag
This is the first place search engines spiders evaluate relevance of the page, and the title of your page, in most cases, in the search engine results. This is your billboard to attract visitors to click on your link, and not the other links. Your title tag should be 70 characters or less. If you want to include your brand name, put it at the end of the tag. Each page needs to have a unique title tag.
META Keywords Tag
This tag is not evaluated in the Google algorithm, so it is not necessary to populate. However, stuffing it with multitudes of phrases can be used against you.
META Description Tag
155 characters is optimal. Ideally you want to incorporate your targeted keyword(s) and a compelling CTA. This tag is one of the three places Google looks to populate content under your organic search result (other two are the content of your page or DMOZ). As an example, go to your browser and type in one of the targeted key phrases (eg, high voltage testing equipment). Link is the Title Tag, description under is either content on page, META Description tag or DMOZ description. If the Title Tag is your billboard, the meta description is your “hook” to define what the page is about. Each page should to have a unique META Description tag.
Page Heading or H1 Tag
This is the second place search engines spiders evaluate relevance of the page. You should incorporate your targeted key phrase (or even repeat your title tag) into H1 messaging. Try to avoid the use of your brand or product naming as your H1, as your brand has no relevance to a visitor who knows nothing about you. In addition to your H1 tag, consider incorporating variations or your targeted key phrase, or even long-tail keywords synonymous to your targeted key phrase into subsequent heading tags (H2, H3, etc). Every page needs to have a unique H1 Tag
Content
Use your targeted key phrases 2-3 times in an average page of 200-250 words. Key phrase should appear once within the first sentences and bolded in the first instance. For each phrase, consider one “parent” or “Godfather” page and several “child” pages of relevance content around the phrase and variations of the phrase. On other pages, link to the phrase using the linked page’s targeted key phrase as anchor text, to reinforce relevance to the page (i.e., on your “pink fuzzy dice” page, you may mention that you also offer blue fuzzy dice, and the phrase “blue fuzzy dice” links to the blue fuzzy dice page).
Home Page Content
If your site has an “about us” section of text on the home page, be sure to have approximately 150 words of text with your most important key phrases (1-3) in the text. These key phrases should be anchor links to the interior pages that are most relevant to the respective phrases.
