How to add keywords to your website

Are you learning about SEO and excited to do it on your website? Have you heard how it brings free traffic to your website if you can rank at the top of Google? Does it sound great to you, but you’re unsure what to do to “do SEO” on your website? It’s OK. I’ll walk you through what to do for SEO on your website. You’ve probably heard that keywords are important but might be wondering what they are, how to choose them, or even how to add keywords to your website. Don’t worry; I’ll walk through all three here.

What are SEO keywords?

Simply SEO keywords or keywords are the words you choose and use on your website page or blog post. You want to choose one keyword for each page or blog post and use that keyword where Google will look for keywords on your page. There are a few rules you need to know about keywords. First, you should choose only one main keyword for each page or post and use that keyword in each SEO element (more on those in a minute). Second, you only want to use that keyword on a maximum of two pages on your entire website or blog because Google will only show two pages of your website or blog in the search results for any keyword search. Third, choosing keywords that give your website has a good chance of ranking at the top of Google is essential, or you won’t get organic (free) traffic from Google. Finally, you need to use keywords that your ideal customer uses when searching for information about your business, products, or services.

For more information on SEO keywords, read this blog post.

Listen to the podcast here.

How do you choose the right SEO keywords for your website?

You will want to choose different keywords for each website page and blog post. You want to consider your ideal customer, their questions, and what they might search for related to your business. It’s important to consider the customer experience when they visit the website. What information are they looking for when they search with a specific keyword?

If you’re optimizing for that keyword, you must ensure that the information you have on the page you use aligns with the information they’re searching for. If you optimize for a keyword, but the content on the page isn’t a great fit, you’re going to get traffic, but it won’t be engaged traffic, and they’ll leave the page quickly, and you won’t get results. Pay attention to the context of the search query.

Some of the keywords your ideal customer uses when searching for information related to your business will be better SEO opportunities for your website than others. You want to look for a keyword with search volume (that means people are searching that keyword in Google) and competition similar to your website. Suppose all websites currently ranking for the keyword you’re considering choosing are big brands or big national sites, and you’re not. In that case, it will likely not be a good keyword for you to use because it’s probably too competitive.

Take my Simple Keyword Research mini-course today to learn how to do SEO keyword rsearch quickly and easily and know that you've found the right SEO keyword. 

How to add keywords to your website.

This is the easiest part of the equation. Once you know what keywords you want to use on each page, you can go into the backend of your website and add them to the places that Google will look for. You must include the keywords in each place, which helps Google understand that this page is about X keyword.

You’ll want to include your keyword in your:

• Title Tag
• Meta Description
• Image File Name
• Image ALT Text
• URL
• Header Tags
• Copy

Using the keyword in only a few places or using different keywords in each place will not work. You need to be consistent. You must also ensure you use the same keyword in the areas that Google and your ideal customer will see. For example, you optimize your title tag in the backend of your website, but it’s for both Google and your ideal customer because it shows up in the search results when people search Google. Your meta description is the same. It’s for both Google and your searcher.

How do you get more keywords to rank?

If you want more keywords to rank, you’ll need to create additional content optimized for search. Each new blog post or website page you create and optimize should be another opportunity for your website to generate free traffic from Google if you create helpful content and optimize it for Google. If you want to learn how to do this, check out this blog post on how to get more keywords to rank.

Adding keywords to your website is the easy part. Choosing the right keyword and following Google’s rules for SEO keyword use is harder. If you’re ready to start SEO today, download a copy of my SEO Content Quick Start Guide, take my free class, and join me in Simple SEO Content. I’ll teach you how to do this so you can add the right keywords to your website and get free traffic from Google. '

How to add SEO Keywords to your Website Podcast Episode Transcript

Hi, welcome back to the Simple SEO Content Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Lindtagen, and today I'm answering one of your questions. Now, if you have questions about SEO or content, do me a favor. DM them to me on Instagram @etchedmarketingacademy, because I love to be able to use your questions in my content and it helps both of us. So if you have questions, please do that. This question actually came in from a member of my three day website traffic booster class and it was a fantastic one. I thought, well, let's go ahead and talk about this on the podcast as well. 

How do I add SEO Keywords to my Website?

So how do I add SEO keywords to my website? I know I need to use keywords, but I'm not really sure what to do with them Rachel. It's a perfect SEO question.

Google SEO Keyword Rules to Know

So what you're going to do is always start. There's a couple of rules you need to understand about keywords. You need to choose a different keyword for each page or blog post that you're creating, because Google is only going to show you a maximum of two times for any given keyword search. So if you're using the same keyword on every page of your website, you're hurting your ranking abilities. You're limiting yourself. So I want you to choose a different keyword for each page or post and make sure that you use that maximum of two times on your entire website. So you're going to need to keep track of the keywords that you're using. If you're on WordPress and you're using, like, the Yoast SEO plugin, it's actually going to keep track of that for you and it's going to tell you if you've used this keyword as a focus keyword previously.

Can your Website Rank for this SEO Keyword?

The next thing I want you to do is to make sure that the keywords that you're using are ones that your website can rank for. This is really important. Some keywords are just going to be too competitive for you to rank for as a small business owner. Nothing against you, nothing mean like that. It's just the fact that you're not going to be able to rank for it because it's just too competitive.

So if you're looking at a keyword and you're going to Google and you're looking in the search results and people like Amazon or Zappos or Nordstrom or really big brands are ranking in positions one, two and three, I want you to look for a different keyword because you're not going to rank for that one. You can do absolutely everything the right way when it comes to SEO, but if you choose the wrong keyword, you will not get results, and then that's just a big old frustration because you've wasted your time.

I teach a lot more about this in my free classes, so go to the website etchedmarketingcom, forward slash freebies, get signed up for my free class and I'll walk you through how to look at all of this and how to find the right keywords. And all of that because this is super important.

Is your Ideal Customer using this SEO Keyword?

The other thing that you really need to look at is what keyword is my ideal customer searching with when they're looking for this topic or this information? Because we want to make sure that we're optimizing with the right keyword. We don't want to optimize for a keyword that our ideal customer is not using because we may be able to rank in position one. But ranking in position one for a keyword that nobody searches with is not going to drive traffic to your website because nobody's going to see it, because nobody's searching. So your number one rankings on a keyword that nobody uses don't help your business. So you really want to think about your customer. What information do they need? What questions are they asking? What terms are they searching with? And I really want you to take note if you think oh my gosh, my customer always asks for it by the wrong name. No, my friend, you're using the wrong word. You need to use the name or the word that your customer is using if you want to get traffic.

I ran into this quite a bit in the corporate world when I was at the agency, because we worked with these really big e-commerce brands, and one in particular was a British brand and they wanted to compete in the US market, which was great, except they didn't want to use US terms and I finally had to have a conversation with them and it was not a super fun conversation as their SEO content strategist. But I said, you have to make a determination here If you're a British brand competing in the US or if you're a US brand. Do you want to be able to be found by a US consumer or do you want to limit yourself to only the US consumer who's willing to use the British UK terminology? Because they wanted to do something like sell sweaters as jumpers and pants as trousers and tennis shoes as plimsolls, and while those are the terms in the UK, they are not the terms that the US consumer uses, so nobody was searching for those terms. They were not growing in the US market and they were not growing in the US market because they were not speaking to a US consumer. So I want you to keep that in mind. Well, that's kind of an extreme example, because they were a big brand and all of that and it was two different countries. You need to use the terms that your ideal customer is using so that you can get traffic, and you need to make sure that the terms that you're choosing you can rank at the top of Google search results for so that you get found and you get traffic. It's pretty simple.

Where to put your SEO Keyword on your Website

So now that we've gone through that, we know that we found the right keyword. Now you're gonna use it in all the places that Google's gonna look for it on your website. To make this easier for you, I do have the SEO content quick start guide. You can get that on the freebies tab on the website etchedmarketingcom forward slash Freebies or you can DM the word SEO To me on Facebook or Instagram and that will send you the guide as well.

Use your SEO Keyword in your Title Tag

You're going to use your keyword in your title tag. Your title tag is the very first thing that a potential visitor sees in the search results when they are searching with their keyword. It's gonna show up above your URL. It's a maximum of 60 characters and that does include spaces, so you are very limited here. It's a very small bit of information. Now, if you can include a call to action term shop, learn, discover, find out you can potentially see up to a 30% increase in the click-through rate, meaning up to 30% more people will click on that listing with that call to action term at the beginning, then one that does not have it. It's not a guarantee, but we definitely have seen that in research studies, so it's a really good thing if you can add it.

Use your SEO Keyword in your Meta Description

Your meta description will also need to include your keyword. Your meta description is a maximum of 160 characters, also including spaces. This one shows up underneath the URL in the search results, so you're going to want to write this more in sentence format. It's going to be one to two sentences, fairly short sentences. That's going to tell a little bit more about this particular page, this blog post, why somebody should click to come to read, to learn more.

Use your SEO Keyword in your Header Tags (this is a Header 2 tag)

You also are going to use your Keyword in your header tags. Those are the big copy blocks that separate your smaller copy blocks on your page. So big font, so your header tags are gonna be like 24 font, versus your regular Text might be a 14 font. They're the real big ones. Use your keywords there. You're gonna format those as h2 tags or h3 tags in your editor on your website. H2 you want to use for your sections, so like if you have a blog post that's three things. These are the three things you need to do for x. Thing one, two and three are all going to be broken out with an h2 tag using the keyword. Then, if you need to break sections one, two or three down further, that's where you would use an h3 tag to separate that out further. Google looks at that and understands the hierarchy, so you need to help Google with that.

Use your SEO Keyword in your Copy

You're also going to use your SEO keyword in your copy on your page. Now, there is no such thing as a keyword density score that Google wants you to hit. I know there's a lot of confusion. I know there've even been some comments recently that Google had a specific keyword density score. Danny Sullivan, who is the head of search for Google, has come out and said no, there is no specific keyword density score that we want you to write to. There's also no perfect word count. We want you to provide value to your customer. We want you to give them what they need. We do not want you to write to a specific word count or a keyword density score. So use your keyword. You're going to naturally use it because your copy should be about whatever your keyword is. It should be the main point. So go through and write your content. What I like to have my students do is reread it out loud to themselves when they're done. If they have used their keyword too many times, which is what we refer to as keyword stuffing it's going to feel weird and awkward when you read it yourself and you're going to be able to tell there's a problem. So reread it out loud to yourself. That'll help you.

Use your SEO Keyword in your Image File Name

The other places you're going to use it will be in your image file name, so you're going to want to rename your image. Don't ever upload another

picture that says image 678. Promise me, you'll never do that again. What you want to do is add your keyword to your image file name. Use the dash, the one that's the minus sign between the words. Use that, because Google reads that as a space in between the words.

Now here's a little bonus here. If you include the business name, so keyword dash, keyword dash, keyword dash, business name you can show up in Google search image search when people search your business name, so it gives you more chances to show up in the search results. So it's a really good thing to do. You can also use your keyword in your image alt text, so using it in there so that other screen readers and things like that see it and know it, and Google's going to look at the image alt text as well to understand what this page is about.

My Free SEO Resources for You

So get my SEO content quick start guide, like I said, etchmarketingcom forward slash freebies or DM me the word SEO on Instagram or Facebook. That's going to have all the rules for where you use your keywords for SEO. And then make sure you take my free SEO class to get started and then, when you're ready, join me in Simple SEO Content, because that's going to be your easiest route to learn all of this, so you're not stuck trying to piecemeal everything together. I've got the class that walks you through it step by step, makes it super easy. All right, I will see you. That is it for how to add your SEO keywords to your website. I'll see you back here next week.