If we accept that a website is made up of different pages showing services, categories or products, we can also say that each one must be optimized with content that’s relevant to search engines.
In SEO, the human factor is very important. It’s the human factor, together with prior analysis and research using the tools available on the market, that will help us identify the best keywords for each section or product and where to place them on the page.
This post isn’t aimed at SEO professionals. Our goal is to help online store owners know where to place keywords and, as far as possible, do it themselves with the help of an SEO plugin or a module included in their eCommerce platform. If you’re a LogiCommerce user, this is covered by default.
All plugins or modules of this kind come with a set of key fields to keep in mind when entering the search terms we want to target. If we know a keyword tool, we’ll use it; if not, don’t panic. Here are some free tools that can help you with this:
- Identify keywords across the most popular search engines: Soovle.
- See search trends for your keywords: Google Trends.
- Alphabetical keyword tool starting from a seed term: Ubersuggest.
Did you imagine you could get such a wide range of keywords?
With these three tools you’ll get a fairly good idea of whether your initial terms are the right ones or need adjusting. If you have a Google AdWords account, you can also use the Keyword Planner.
After this introduction and a look at some basic tools, let’s go through the areas where you should place your search terms:
- Page titles: after the domain or URL, the title is the most important place for your keyword, since Google gives it significant weight. Lately there’s been debate about whether having the keyword in the domain is losing value.
- Meta description: This meta tag matters because of its power to win users over. Write it to grab their attention and include the page’s main keyword. It should encourage users to click and highlight the benefits of the services or products they’ll see once they do.
- Headings: The name of the category, service or product can serve as the heading. Content management systems usually output this text as the h1 in the source code or HTML.
- Text visible to users: We recommend that the first lines contain the keywords used in the title, meta description and headings. It’s important that this copy is original, not copied from elsewhere, and long enough to describe each category or product properly.
- Link text: It should be descriptive and related to the page it leads to. Avoid text like click here, more information and the like.
- Title attributes: These are found on links and should contain the keyword related to the category or product they point to.
- Alt attribute: Text that accompanies an image. It should be descriptive. This attribute is shown whenever an image fails to load.
With these pointers on the basic places to put your keywords, you’ve got work ahead of you. Of course, this doesn’t guarantee rankings, but it does help with better indexing, since you’re showing Google the words it should index you for.
Image source: www.socialtalent.co
