If you have read our previous lesson “What Are Keywords?” let’s move on to how to use them. As we explained in the prior lesson, keywords are what make or break your website when ranking within search engines.

Here are the steps we are going to explain with using them:

• Meta Tags
• Navigation Menu’s
• Text Formatting
• Anchor Text / Back Links

Meta-Tags

Please read our other lessons on meta-tags and how to use them for a more in depth explanation on what they are and how to use them.

Meta-Title, Meta-Keywords, Meta-Description

Meta tags are the information in your header that tells the search engines what your website and certain pages are. In your tags you have the Title, Description, Keywords. The title is well, what it says. It is your page title. In your title you want to use keywords within your description. Please refrain from using your website name or your website address in the title unless your website name has the keywords in it that you are trying to rank for. In the title use a brief description of what your page is about while using a keyword or two within it.

Your meta-keywords are the keywords that your site is relevant to and what you are trying to rank for. Use no more than 30.

The meta description is what the description of your page is and this comes up in search engines under the page title/url/link to your site. Again use a brief description using no more than 140-160 characters in it with keywords that you are trying to rank for in it also.

Navigation Menu’s

For a more in depth explanation on how to optimize your navigation menu’s please visit our lesson for Focusing On Navigation Menu’s.

To give a brief explanation, you want to use keywords in place of your categories in your navigation menu’s. This helps you rank for the given keywords and it tells the search engines what each page/category is about and pretty much helps map your website out for the search engines.

Text Formatting

When writing your articles in the body of your page, you want to build it around keywords that you are ranking for. In the title of your article you want to use <h1>, tags which are basic HTML header tags for a paragraph. These tags weigh a lot within search engines.

When using keywords within your articles you want to bold and italicize them which also makes them stick out within search engines and also makes them weigh a lot. Don’t over due it with the bolding and italicizing of keywords for your page will look spammy and non-user friendly. Try to use each keyword 5-7 times in an article and don’t use anymore than 2-3 keyword phrases in each article.

Anchor Text / Back Links

As explained in our previous lesson, anchor text is one of the main factors in your website ranking. The anchors help tell the search engines that this is a keyword phrase that your site is about hence when someone goes to search for example “SEO Tips” your site will come up. Whether it is first page or 20-30 pages back, it will come up. To help rank higher you want to use anchors in your back links. A back link is simply a link from another site to yours. As explained in the previous lesson, a back link is basically counted as a “Vote” for your website.

Always link with quality sites preferably with a high page rank. You can use the Google Page Rank Check Tool to determine what other websites rank. The ranking chart goes from 1-10, 10 being the highest.

For more information please visit our lesson on Anchor Text.