Gabriel Machuret | SEO consultant

Even though Google and other major search engines don’t pay attention to Meta Keyword Tags, it is still advisable to use them, although many people will advice you against them. Meta Tags will help you remember the keyword phrases you are optimizing the pages for especially when dealing with lots of web pages. When it comes to the META description tag, let the keyword phrase be as near the start of the sentence as possible and then make the tag a full sentence.

1.Never use italic or bold keyword phrases in your first sentence of a page, but you can put crucial keyword phrases in the first sentence but never the first word.

2.Use your keyword phrases in all your headings i.e. H1, H2, H3

3.Bold keyword phrases should start appearing in the second paragraph and Italics should appear a few times after your first usage of the particular keyword in question. As a rule of thumb, never allow the first usage of keyword phrases to be in Italics

4.Use keywords in ALT tags

5.It’s advisable to let other websites use your most important keyword phrase on your pages in the inbound links. While most websites will link to your home page, ensure you give them the main keyword phrase that you’re optimizing the home page for.

6.For internal linking i.e. from one page back to your home page, ensure your most important key phrase is used in the link and in the event that your homepage is linking to another page, use the keyword phrase in the link that your other page has been optimized for.

7.Putting keyword phrases on the left navigation panel will take you nowhere. Google in particular prefer keywords in full sentences, a full sentence in this case is defined as 3 or more words that start with a capital letter and end with a full stop or any other punctuation. However, words like “the,” “a,” “I,” “of” etc do not count as among the three words of a sentence.

8.To rank among the top websites, if not be the first website, your keyword relevancy is much more important than your page Rank. For instance, you can have a PageRank of 10 and still not show up anywhere in the top 100 websites when a web user searches for “peanut butter sandwiches”, unless your WebPages are already optimized and have high relevance for the keyword phrase.

9.To maximum results, use your keyword phrase in the H1, H2, or H3 headline and then immediately follow it with a keyword-rich paragraph, which you should then repeat using another H1, H2, or H3 headline and a keyword-rich paragraph, and the chain should continue.

10.Never try to optimize a single page for more than 2 or 3 keyword phrases and always aim to optimize the phrases not the keywords. This is because among other reasons, the keyword is included in the keyword phrase and the fact that many people wouldn’t go searching for a single word.