Understanding Keyword Consistency and How to Optimize Your Website Pages
What is the difference between keyword density and keyword consistency? Keywords that you want to rank for must be both consistent and spread throughout the elements of your site. Both are important and must be well-balanced.
Making your site consistent with keywords makes it easier for Google to crawl and index your site. It helps indicate to which category or topic your site belongs.
How to Optimize your Web Pages for Keyword Consistency
Every web page should have a unique meta title
Your meta titles should have your targeted keywords, since search engine bots determine the relevance of your site for the keywords in search queries. Phrases should be separated with a dash. Below is an image of Amazon.com review that was performed through WooRank which will help you understand what a meta title is:
Your meta title should contain a maximum of 50-60 characters, and have several keywords that should make sense for both your target audience and search engines to discover. Keep the primary/main keywords at the beginning so the search engines find them most relevant to search queries.
Keywords and Meta Description
The meta description is a summary of the content on a web page. It usually appears as part of the listing on search engines results pages. It provides the search engine and users a general idea about the information contained on that particular website page.
If a user finds the meta description relevant to what they are looking for, it entices them to click the SERP listing to visit your website.
Most of the times, the meta description shows up in search results if it includes the keyword that a user keyed in the search query. Just like in the meta title, keep the main keyword near the beginning. It will help increase your click through rate.
Here is a summary of what a good meta description should be:
- Unique (not the same on any two pages)
- User Focused (include words proving value for the user
- Match the page content and use the focus keyword
- 135 to 165 characters (spaces and punctuation count)
- Include the main keyword toward the beginning
Include a CTA (call to action) – this is the action that you want people to take, for instance, “Buy Now”, “Learn More”, and “Click Here”
Keywords on your Headings and Subheadings
Do not copy and paste your meta titles. Type them into the appropriate meta tag.
Search engine bots crawl headers and subheaders to determine your page’s content. You’ll want to include your main keyword with a h1 tag, the most important heading tag for your page. Use sub-heads from h2 to h> to spread your keywords and create consistency throughout your page or blog. Make sure to include a “h1 tags” in each page.
Heading tags generally have default styling which can make them extremely large. Your website designer can use coding to make them any font, size or color.
Run a review with WooRank and their crawlers will index and collect the keyword consistency from your url so you can get a better idea of what keyword you are consistent with, check the screenshot below.
Keywords on your Image Alt Tags
Bots have a hard to identifying what your images is saying, search engines are able to crawl the images even if the text in the image alt tag may not appear on your website. If the images have alt-text added to the image, bots can easily identify what the image is for and help your site rankings. If you are using multiple words for your images names, use dashes and not underscores to separate words. Ideally your image names will include the keyword for which you want the page to rank.
Use the keywords that are likely to best resonate with your audience or that match their search queries in your image alt tags. It is important for bots and crawlers to determine relevance to a search query based on your images.
Keywords and Page Content
Create in-depth content that covers a topic comprehensively so that it can also implement latent semantic keywords (words that are topically related to other words). This way, your page’s ties to a similar topic, increasing your page’s ranking.
Do not spin or copy content. Search engines may leave your website out of search engine results, totally. High-quality content allows your content to be evergreen, staying relevant for years. If you are using content provided by a third party you may want to use CopyScape to make certain the content is original, not plagiarized.
Keywords and File Names
You’ll want to use the keywords at the beginning of each file you have, whether it be .pdf, powerpoint, infographics, doc, etc. Best practices in naming each file includes: using hyphens instead of underscores, spacing out the words, as in “How to Rank your website” instead of “howtorankyoursite”. It will also have less impact on keywords, if your filename is too long. Just ensure it is possible to tell what the file contains.
If you’re embedding a video or a powerpoint presentation, post a transcript or outline your file in HTML.
Give search engine bots content to crawl and maximize on the opportunity to name your file and add relevant content to rank your pages.
Keyword consistency helps your site to rank higher in search results. Knowing what keywords to rank and doing keyword research is the first step to ranking high on search engines. Knowing where to put them can help distribute, optimize and provide consistency for search engines to identify what your site is about and rank them. If you are not sure about what are high traffic keywords you can order custom keyword reports from E-Platform Marketing.
