How To Add Keywords To A Website

Intro

When it comes to SEO, keywords are key. Adding the right keywords to your website can help you rank higher in search engine results pages and attract more visitors.

But how do you find the right keywords to target? And once you've found them, how do you add them to your site?

In this blog post, we'll walk you through the process of adding keywords to a website. We'll also share some tips for finding the right keywords to target. So read on for all the details!

Page Title (or Title Tag)

The most important place to add your target keyword is in your page's title tag. The title tag is what tells search engines what your page is actually about, much like the title of a book ideally tells you what the book is about.

If your page is targeting multiple similar keywords, then your main keyword(the most relevant one and the one with the most search volume) should be in the title.

For example, a page about the best home coffee makers would probably target both "best home coffee makers" and "best coffee makers for home" since the search intent behind both of them is the same.

In this case, you'd have to open up your favorite keyword tool and see which one has greater search volume.

Inserting keywords in Wordpress is fairly straightforward. To make life easier, use a plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math to help you edit the title tag for every page and post.

You shouldn't just stop at your keyword in the title tag, though. Use power words and numbers to help boost your click-through rate.

Common power words are "best," "reviews," "top," and "cheap." You can also use numbers like and the year to show that your blog is regularly updated.

Here's an example of how this might look in practice:

The 10 Best Coffee Makers for Home (2023 Review)

This title not only contains the main keyword, "best coffee makers for home," but it also has a number ("10") and a power word ("best").

Your title tag must be under 60 characters, so to make sure it fits use Rank Tracker's SERP simulator to test how different title tags look on Google search.

Alt tag: ranktracker’s serp simulator lets you preview how your site will look in search engine result pages

H1 Tag

The next place to put your keyword in terms of priority is the H1 tag. This is usually the title of your blog post, the name of your category, or the name of your product and so on.

The H1 tag is a heading tag. Heading tags tell search engines what specific sections of your content are about. H1 is the highest priority, which is why it's used as the primary heading.

The H1 tag is almost the same as the title tag, and in WordPress, the default title tag is pulled from whatever your H1 tag is.

Common best practice is to keep your H1 tag and title tag the same. After all, if people click on your title from the search engine results, they'll expect to see a page with the same primary heading!

URL

The title tag, the H1, and the URL make up what Matt Diggity calls the "Three Kings" of SEO. Much like your title tag, the URL is a great place to really tell search engines what your page is about.

Simply keep the URL slug for the page as the keyword itself. If there are spaces in the keyword, they will be converted to dashes, and that's perfectly normal.

To continue the above example of The 10 Best Coffee Makers for Home (2023 Review), your ideal URL would be:

https://yoursite.com/best-coffee-makers-for-home/

Avoid adding numbers in the URL unless you're confident that the numbers won't change.

For example, don't add the year or the number of items on the list because both the year and the number of items can change as you update your post over time.

However, if the year is inextricably linked to the keyword(such as best movies of 2019), or the number of items are not likely going to change(7 days of the week), you can add the number to the URL as well.

If you use WordPress, you can change the URL by either adjusting the "Permalink" option OR by going to Rank Math/Yoast SEO and editing the "slug".

H2 and H3 tags

After the H1 tag, you'll want to use H2 and H3 tags for subheadings. Subheadings are an important way of breaking up your content while still maintaining a clear structure.

While not as important as the title tag or H1 tag, it's still good practice to include keywords in your H2 and H3 tags when possible.

For example, if you have a blog post about the best coffee makers for home, your H2 tags might be something like:

• Types of Coffee Makers
• Features to Look for in a Coffee Maker
• The 10 Best Coffee Makers for Home

Notice how the keyword, "coffee maker," appears in two of the three subheadings. This is a great way to naturally include keywords without making your content sound like gibberish.

H3 tags would then be about french presses, drip coffee makers, espresso machines, and more.

You'd also use H3 tags as the heading for each individual coffee maker in your review.

In WordPress, you can add H2 and H3 tags by using the "Heading" drop-down menu in the editor.

It's important to note that your H2/H3 structure is very fluid and the best way to determine how you'll structure your H2s and H3s is to simply search for your target keyword in Google and see how your competitors on page 1 are approaching it.

Body Copy

Your body copy is the actual content on your page. This is where you really get to show off what you know about your topic.

The common advice is that you want to keep your keyword density between 0.5% and 2%. That means if you have a 1000-word article, you want to use your keyword 5-20 times.

However, this is not set in stone and the best way to approach this is to see how often your competitors on page 1 are using it and shoot for the same figure.

A simple way to manually do this is to open up the pages of your competitors, hit Control-F or Cmd-F, and type in your keyword. Make a note of how many times the keyword appears.

Repeat this process for 2-3 competitors and you'll have an average.

This is a very manual process, so you can use tools like Surfer SEO's Content Editor to calculate these numbers automatically.

More important than the _amount _of times you use the keyword is where you use it in your body copy.

Best practice suggests that your keyword should appear at least within the first 50-100 words of your content(after the H1, of course).

This is a sure-shot way of letting people and search engines know exactly what your page is about. Additional keywords can drastically help improve any Airbnb management company. Say you are trying to rank for the target keyword massage Mornington for a massage therapist in Mornington, Victoria. You do that by including that target keyword on the webpage.

Internal links

Internal links are simply hyperlinks that point to another page on your site. For example, if you're reading a blog post about the best coffee makers for home and there's a link to the homepage, that's an internal link.

Adding internal links is important because it helps search engines understand the structure of your website while also helping visitors navigate your site.

There have been multiple case studies where site owners have managed to significantly increase their traffic only through adding internal links, so make sure you don't skip out on this easy win.

To build even more relevance, use exact match keywords and synonyms in the anchor text of your internal links.

In WordPress, you just have to highlight the text you wish to use as a link, and in the little pop-up that appears, you can search for the page you want to link to. WordPress will find it for you and you can automatically add the link.

Alt: Wordpress makes it easy to add internal links

External links

External links are hyperlinks that point to another website. For example, if you're reading a blog post about the best coffee makers for home and there's a link to Amazon, that's an external link.

External links are important because they help improve your website's authority.

You want to have external links going from your site to others, and you also want to work with other website owners to get external links from their site pointing to yours.

In theory, the more websites that link to you, the more search engines will view your website as an authority on the topic, which in turn will help your website rank higher and generate more leads.

When building external links to your site(such as through a guest post), you have to be very careful with your anchor text. You don't always want to use the very keyword you are targeting, because that can be seen as manipulation and set you up for a penalty.

For the safest bet, build just one link with exact-match anchor text from the most relevant and highest authority domain you can work with, and use branded or generic anchor text from every other site.

Images

Images are an important part of any website, but they're especially important for SEO. This is because images can help improve your website's engagement, which is a major ranking factor.

Make sure to add images to all your pages and blog posts, and optimize them for SEO by including keywords in the file name and using the alt text to describe what's in the image.

Alt tags

Alt tags are what search engines actually crawl, since they are unable to "read" the contents of the image.

You can see the alt tag for an image by hovering over it with your mouse and seeing the tool tip that appears.

The best way to write alt tags is to make them as descriptive as possible.

Let's say you had an image of a Nespresso coffee maker on your page. An alt tag you could use would be:

"Nespresso Latissima coffee maker - white with black trim"

This alt tag contains a keyword(nespresso latissima coffee maker) as well as a description of the image.

Context

Where you place the image can also make a difference. Google is really good at reading context, so place your image in highly relevant areas of your post, preferably surrounded by keywords as closely as possible.

A combination of context and alt tags can help your image rank high in Google Image search, which can in turn bring you a lot of traffic and backlinks.

Keywords Meta Tag

The keywords meta tag is a relic of the past and is pretty much ignored by search engines nowadays.

Back in the day, people would stuff the keywords meta tag with hundreds of keywords in an attempt to game the system. This led to a lot of low-quality, keyword-stuffed content that provided no value to readers.

Because of this, search engines stopped paying attention to the keywords meta tag altogether.

That being said, there's no harm in including a few relevant keywords in the keywords meta tag. Just don't go overboard.

Example of a Well-Optimized Web Page

Affiliate marketing websites tend to be REALLY good at optimizing pages for SEO, so I decided to use one as one of the best examples of a well-optimized page.

Take a look at this “best credit cards” page from NerdWallet.com.

See how the URL and Title both have the keyword in them:

The H1 tag of the post is the same as the title, both of which contain the main keyword.

The main keyword is also mentioned in the introduction(it starts at the 9th word).

The product name is an H3, and there is an image as well.

Different categories of credit cards start with an H2.

Conclusion

Adding keywords to a website can be done in a number of ways, but the most important places to add them are in the title tag, URL, heading tags, and body content. Images and links can also contain keywords, and should be used thoughtfully to help improve your site’s SEO.