How to Best Optimize Your Keywords?

by +Mina Adly Younan
To best optimize your posts, keywords should be inserted in all of the following:

• Title
• Description
• H1 Headline
• Body Text
• Anchor Texts
• Image Alt attributes
• URL

Here is a good example of a well-optimized page:

Body Tags

• How many Times keywords should be used per post? - 2-3X for one page, 4-6X for more than one page.
• Keyword Usage Variations - We recommend employing at least one or two variations of a term. You can use synonyms, plurals, acronyms, etc. (example: playing soccer with your children, Plying football with your kids)
• Image Filename - Since image traffic can be a substantive source of visits and image filenames appear to be valuable for this as well as natural web search, we suggest using the keyword term/phrase as the name of the image file employed on the page.
• Bold/Strong - Using a keyword in bold/strong appears to carry a very, very tiny amount of SEO weight, and thus it's suggested as a best practice to use the targeted term/phrase at least once in bold, though a very minor one.
• Italic/Emphasized - Surprisingly, italic/emphasized text appears to have a similar to slightly higher correlation with high rankings than bold/strong and thus, we suggest its use on the targeted keyword term/phrase in the text.

Page Structure

• Keyword Location - We advise that important keywords should, preferably, be featured in the first few words (50-100 words of a page's post. Search Engines (Google) do appear to have some preference for pages that employ keywords sooner, rather than later, in the text.
• Content Structure – Although not declared by search engines, it is better to use a particular content format (introduction, body, examples, conclusion OR the journalistic style of narrative, data, conclusion, parable).

Meta Description:

The Meta description is a short paragraph (60 - 160 characters) that can be added to each page of a website (in a specific place in the HTML) where it can appear on SERPs after the page title as a description to that page’s content. If a blog author forgets to add a Meta description, search engines will index the top 2 lines they find on the post content and show them after the page title as a description. In most of the time they are not written to describe the whole page’s content or to give an encouraging message for the searchers to click on that specific page and read its content. Meta Description is also important as it appears on social media when the page is shared and on sitelinks on SERPs (like in the below example):

Thus, it is always recommended to create a compelling unique descriptive paragraphs (between 150-160 characters) for all the site’s pages.