We regularly field requests from customers to improve their search engine ranking for certain keywords or keyphrases. Many customers still assume that there are some hidden settings (for example the meta keywords tag) for making this happen. While the meta keywords tag still exists, it is essentially useless now, because search engines care more or less ignore it, and have done for years now.
The most important thing to know about keywords is that it’s based not on hidden settings (as used to be the case 10, 20 years ago), but on the text the user actually sees on the site.
The easiest ways to boost specific words or phrases
- Create a page with the desired keyword/phrase as its title, and repeat it several times in the text on that page, ideally in some h2 tags as well as in regular text.
- Use the keyword/phrase in headings, links, and text wherever you can include it in a way that is still logical for the end user. It still has to be human-friendly.* You want to avoid keyword-stuffing a page. An extreme (but not uncommon) example of keyword-stuffing is when a site displays a long list of keywords (often at the bottom of a page), and some will even hide that text with CSS.. that can get you penalized by Google.
- Include the keyword or keyphrase in the page’s meta description.
What else you can do to improve your site’s SEO
Your site should also contain an XML sitemap, which should be submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. This XML sitemap’s URL should be included in your site’s robots.txt file. The XML sitemap should be configured to automatically update itself whenever pages or post is added / deleted / unpublished. This serves to keep the search engines in the loop on your site’s structure and content. Otherwise they might not index all of your site, or they may take longer to pick up on changes.
The above are the essential components of organic (a.k.a. “natural”) SEO. There are other aspects to it, such as keyword research, backlinks, performance optimization, and link building. Those can certainly be worth spending time on (especially keyword research), but we always start with ensuring the site’s content itself is SEO-optimized (as laid out above), otherwise the rest doesn’t matter very much. Why waste time and money building backlinks to your site when the site’s own content isn’t as optimized as it can be? Once it is, the other organic SEO strategies can be implemented, and paid ads and/or social media marketing could be thrown into the mix at that point as well.