Search engines rank your website in the results page according to the relevancy of your content to the searched keywords. This relevancy is determined by the authority of your website, but also by the keywords prevalent throughout your content.
Keyword targeting means sprinkling carefully-chosen keywords, relevant to your website, throughout your content, thus encouraging search engines to view your website as relevant to certain keyword searches.
Aims of Keyword Targeting
When your website doesn’t appear on the first page of the search results after a relevant keyword search, then you’ll get little traffic through search engines. That’s because only about 10% of searchers check the second page of the search results.
Ideally, you want to rank among the first 3 websites on the first results page. And keyword targeting can help you. That said, bear in mind that SEO is complex and involves many other things besides keywords.
So while keyword targeting remains crucial for good ranking, it won’t provide a top ranking on its own, especially when we’re talking about highly competitive keywords.
Effective Keyword Targeting
Keyword targeting means essentially identifying the most relevant and accessible keywords that definite what your website is about, and then sprinkling them throughout your website content, ensuring that they don’t represent more than 1-2% of an article’s total word count.
Ideally, you should use one main key phrase (a group of relevant keywords) for each of your web pages, and a few secondary keywords. The main key phrase should appear only once or twice in the text body, every hundred words, as well as once in the title and other important places.
The main key phrase should appear in your…
- URLs—note that it’s preferable to have the key phrase (or at least a keyword) in the root domain rather than in the sub-domain.
- Inbound links
- Internal links from your own sub domains to your web pages
- Page title
- Meta description—keywords here don’t count for the ranking, but can encourage users to visit your web page.
- Header text
- Text body—keyword should not be obtrusive and make the text read oddly.
- Image ALT text—a keyword here provides a small ranking boost.
- Pictures, infographics, media files name—name any media file you upload to your website with relevant keywords.
Users First, Keywords Second
Keyword targeting should enhance user experience by helping users find the information they are looking for more easily. It should not make user experience worse by stuffing your web pages with keywords that make the text read oddly.
Conclusion
Keyword targeting is crucial for SEO. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy. The hardest part is doing your research and identifying the keywords and key phrases that you should target. Once you do that, it will be easy to sprinkle them through your content, especially when both the keywords and the content match each other.