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HOW TO USE KEYWORDS FOR EFFECTIVE SEO

Written by: Gene Sower

Article Overview: Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the lifeblood of any effective website. Here's how to grab the low hanging SEO fruit to be sure and get your share.

HOW TO USE KEYWORDS FOR EFFECTIVE SEO

ALT tags are a SEO gift from the Search Engine Gods. Here's why. Your goal for attracting search engine traffic to your web site means your web page or pages must contain the keyword phrase that people are looking for. Obvious enough, right? And I’m not going to go into the whole explanation of what keywords to pick since that's an entirely different discussion. What I will say is this: One of your primary goals in keywording your site is to strive for a certain keyword density on each page. Meaning, you want to have the desired keyword phrase strategically woven throughout the copy in a manner that would please the Goldilocks — not too much, not too little —just right. How much is just right? Well, that’s also a subject for another discussion but I will tell you this: the overall copy on the keyworded page should be at least 300 words. 300 to 500 words, with the keywords woven throughout in an hour glass format is just about perfect. Hourglass, you may ask? That means seeding the copy a lot at the beginning, tapering off in the middle and then pumping it up again at the end. So here’s the takeaway message and the “Tip Of The Day”: In addition to customizing the META tags and making sure you have enough keyword density on each page, use your photo’s ALT tags to place keywords. In fact, look for excuses to use images like GIFs and JPGs to not only break up your page and make it more inviting to read, but because it’s a totally legit, White Hat way of adding your desired keywords to that page. The term "ALT tags" is short for Alternative tag. This harkens back to the bad old days of dialup when connections to the Internet were so slow people would turn the images off so their pages would load faster. The ALT tag was used by web coders to replace the photo with a descriptive word so instead of an X where the photo was supposed to be, the ALT tage would say "Cat" or "boat" or whatever the photo was. So the next time you’re designing a webpage or someone’s doing it for you, instead of naming that photo on your site “photo1.jpg” or “image2.gif”, call it “your-keyword.jpg” or whatever your keyword is. And for maximum effect, be sure to use dashes in between multiple words — don’t run the together like “yourkeyword.gif”. Use keywords liberally in the ALT tags and watch your pages climb! The SEO Gods will smile favorably down upon you.

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Article Tags: coders, descriptive word, designing a webpage, dialup, goldilocks, harkens, hour glass, images, jpgs, keyword density, keyword phrase, meta tags, photo, search engine traffic, tip of the day, web page



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