SEO Guide – Understanding Keywords

Now that you have optimised your website, the next step is to focus on adding the right keywords and descriptions for your website pages and blog posts.

It can be quite confusing when it comes to choosing keywords and where to place them within our website. There are so many keywords to choose from, do you go with one word?, do you add a sentence with keywords?. Well below is part 2 of our SEO Guide which will help you choose the right keywords and descriptions for your website.

Choosing Keywords and Meta Descriptions – Part 2

Keywords

When choosing keywords for your website page or blog post you need to consider what your page content is about and something that I find very helpful is think as if you were the user searching, what would you type into Google in order to find your page? It doesn’t need to be just one word, usually when users search Google they enter a couple of words or even a sentence.

For example, if I was looking for cheap hotels in Paris, I would probably type into Google the following:
“cheap hotels in Paris” or “the cheapest hotels in Paris” or even “cheap hotel deals in Paris”

So if I had a website that offered cheap hotels in Paris and one of my website pages was about cheap hotel deals in France or Paris, I would look at using the following type of keywords:

“cheap hotel deals in France”, “hotel deals in Paris”,  “cheap places to stay in Paris”

You are allowed to have keywords that is a short sentence or question, one word keywords are very unlikely to help with users find your website pages.

You can also have up to 5 keywords per page, anymore than this a Google may think you are spamming keywords throughout your website and may decide to blacklist your website. So be careful!

Something that is also very important is that, you should use your chosen keywords throughout your page content, the more often the keywords appear on the page the higher they will be ranking on Google. Of course make sure the content makes sense and is still relevant.

Meta Description

When you search Google for anything, you will see the page title and then below that is a small description relating to that page. As shown below.

That description below the website URL is called a Meta Description, this is great for explaining briefly what your page content is about but you can also use it to include a couple of relevant keywords that is also used on your page.

When writing a meta description think about what your website your website content is about, but also think about your keywords.

For example, you can see the above image as include the keyword cheap hotel in Paris, which was the keyword I typed into Google, having that keyword in the meta description helps to improve your page ranking in Google but also to help users find your content.

With meta descriptions there is a recommended limit of 156 characters, you can add more if you like however Google recommends no more than 156 because that is the amount that can be see in the search results, anymore then that and the rest of the content will get cut off and become irrelevant.

With just making these two changes to each page on your website and each blog post, this will help improve the individual pages search ranking.

We hope you found this blog post helpful and that it’s helped you gain a better understanding of keywords and meta descriptions.

In our SEO Guide part 3, we will be discussing website sitemaps and Google Webmasters.

© Littlebigbox Limited is a company registered in England (Company No. 13663893) Romsey, SO51 6BY. (VAT No. GB448056874). All Rights Reserved · Privacy Policy