You may have wondered- What are these keywords anyway? What’s the use of relevant keywords, and what is their importance?

Well, it is a universal truth that using keywords in your content makes it easier for search engine crawlers and human viewers to find your content and rank you higher. However, that doesn’t mean you can stuff your content with a lot of keywords. Overstuffing can produce totally different results and dump your content into oblivion.

So what are these keywords, and how much should I use them to rank my content? Let’s read on the blog to find out.

What Are SEO Keywords?

Let’s first start by understanding what SEO keywords mean. In layperson terms, keywords are phrases or words that users type in search engines to find relevant content for themselves.

They can type in anything that makes sense to their query. It could be a single word such as “guitar,” “SEO,” etc., or it could be phrases such as “How to learn guitar” or navigation queries like “Instagram login.”

Search engine crawlers then search for contents that include these keywords and share the topmost relatable items that will suit the intended audience. That, in a nutshell, is how keywords work. Understanding and catering to user intent is the key to effective keyword usage. Google and many other companies keep an account for the most used keywords in the searches, which digital marketers and SEO consultant can use to identify their target audience and create their SEO Keywords strategies.

Hence, the first step for you is to find the highly relevant keywords for your content. Secondly, you need to understand how to use them to target your audience.

One of the most crucial aspects that many people need to acknowledge is that the audience is the key! You write content for the humans to read. If your article provides value to people, your engagement will grow, resulting in a higher search engine ranking. Your audience's needs and interests should always come first.

But many creators dismiss this aspect, and to rank high, they stuff their content with keywords for the crawler to see. It might give them some ranking initially, but it ranks down due to fewer user interactions. So make sure you keep the end users and their interests first.

7 Ways To Use Keywords In Your Content

As per SEO best practices and Google Analytics guidelines, here are the top 7 ways you can use keywords in your content for best results.

1. Page Title

A keyword on the title of your page, article, or any other content is a high priority! You must add your primary keywords to the page title tag. SEO-friendly titles are essential in browser tabs, SERPs, search results, and social media posts. They give crawler bots and users concise and to-the-point information about the page content. Follow these methods to add SEO keywords in the page title:

Many Content Management Systems(CMS), such as WordPress, allow easy addition of title tags to the pages and posts. You can write a title with a keyword in the respective field, and CMS will register it as a title tag with <title> HTML tag value.

Place the Primary Keyword at the Start if Possible: It’s a rule of thumb to put your keywords at the beginning of the title tag, especially when you have long and complex titles.

Don't use the above method if the title isn’t readable or engaging. Having a keyword in the title along with relevant words is essential. As I said before, user intent should be your priority. Writing an engaging title that describes the content effectively to the users is more important. However, keywords in the beginning are indeed still an advantage.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing at all cost: Use keywords just enough that the content is readable and enjoyable for the user. Using it once is enough if it serves the purpose. Repeating and using it in irrelevant places to fulfill the crawler’s needs will only make your content appear spammy and discourage clicks. To maintain organic CTR (Click-Through Rate), the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page and write a clean title with either 1 or 2 different keywords.

2. Page URL

After the page title, you must add keywords to the URL. A rule of thumb is to ensure your URLs contain either your primary or long-tail keywords (keywords with phrases). If your URL includes the title of the blog or page, you should remove redundant stop words such as ‘how, why, to, end, before, etc.’ to unstuff them with such unimportant words.

For instance, in the URL 'how-to-use-seo-keywords ', 'how' and 'to' are stop words that can be removed.

URLs are essential for SERPs. Making them concise helps bots and users know what the content is about.

For example, suppose your page title is “10 Useful Tips to Rank Higher with SEO Keywords”. In that case, your page URL can be set to “high-ranking-SEO-keywords-tips,” which matches a long-tail keyword, or to “SEO-keywords-tips,” which matches with the primary keyword of the article.

3. Meta Description

Meta Description of your page is our next important SEO element when placing keywords.

Meta Description is a summary you write about your content that appears on the search results along with the URL and page title. Whenever you search for a keyword, you may notice that search engines highlight those keywords and phrases in your query from the content present. This helps the users to read and find the relevant results and click the most appropriate search result.

The Meta Description should be around 160 characters, and your keywords should sound natural in the content.

4. Page Headings

Let me provide some technical information before we discuss this. When we write content, we also write different headings to tell the readers what particular information they will read. It also helps in putting the content in a sophisticated form. When you post your content online via a CMS, different tags are used for different headings.

H1 Tag- used for main headings or the headings that include subheadings. It can also be used for the title of a blog. For example- in this blog, ‘ What are SEO Keywords’ and ‘7 Ways to use Keywords in Your Content’ are H1 Tag headings.

H2 Tag: H2 Tags are subheadings denoting particular chapters or content inside a significant heading. If H1 is used for the title, H2 Tags are used for page headings. For example, If the major heading was ‘7 Ways to use keywords’, all seven items you will talk about can come under the H2 Tag.

And relatively, if there are more subheadings under it, H3 and H4 Tags are further used.

However, the H1 tag is distinct from the page title, even though many CMS and users consider them similar. What you write in a page title is registered as <title> tag and is placed on the header, while the title in H1 tag is wrapped in <h1> or </h1> tag and is placed on the body of the page.

Treat the H1 Tag as the page title and add your primary keywords with the guidelines for PAGE TITLE. While putting the values into CMS, a rule of thumb is to use the same values for both page title and H1 Tag, but plugins(such as Yoast SEO) also allow you to differentiate them. You can choose any operation as per your need.

You can add long-tail keyword variations of the primary heading for the rest of your page headings(H2, H3, H4). Once again, consider the visitor’s readability and engagement while writing the headings and their respective content. Be as natural as possible.

5. Main Content

For your main content, use as many keywords as possible. A general rule of thumb is that you should ideally put keywords with 1.5-2% of the total word count of the content. For example, if the total word count of your article is 100 words. Your primary keyword should be in the range of 15-20 keywords only. Exceeding it will overstuff your content, making it spammy and unreadable for the visitor, while an amount lower than ten might not help you rank your content.

Make sure you put a keyword in your opening paragraph. It helps rank better, and you can use it for the meta description. You can also use close variations of your primary keyword. The secondary keywords you will use don’t have such rules or guidelines. You can use them as naturally as you can in the content.

Finally, write as naturally as possible. Even if you didn’t put enough keywords per the word count, crawlers and search engines have become smart enough to identify a page’s intent. The post will rank if it is user-intuitive and can hold their attention.

6. Anchor Text For Links

The visible part of any link is the anchor text. They help search engine crawlers and bots with the linked page, its content, and external links.

Some Google guidelines:

You can use keywords for internal links(links in your content that refer to other pages of your website) as they will suit your website and the pages.

For external links, avoid using anchor texts that exactly match the links’ title or URL tag. Put these links in a naturally flowing language that fits into the content.

7. Image ALT Text

Lastly, another critical SEO element in which to place keywords is image ALT text. The ALT text is registered in the <img> element and is used to describe the particular image to search engines and users.

You can optimize images in your content by providing an ALT attribute and describing the image with the relevant keywords. However, ensure that the alt text is relevant to the image and serves the purpose. It won’t work if you only stuff it for the sake of adding a keyword that is irrelevant to the images.

How Many Keywords Should You Use On A Page?

Every page of your website should target a single keyword or a group of highly related keywords. If you use more, you may face keyword cannibalization issues that will jeopardize your content.

Be sure you add all keywords in the places I mentioned as naturally as possible. That is enough for SEO optimization; the crawlers will rank the content organically as they deem fit. Anything unnecessary will make your content look bad, uninteresting, and overstuffed, damaging your ranking.

I hope this article helps you. If you are still worried about your SEO Ranking or have any related issues, you can contact us with your queries. We at Ophanim provide the best custom SEO solutions and are always ready to help businesses, content marketers, and anyone in this field. We would love to help you.