When it comes to the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) it can often become difficult to know where to start. There are many right answers, and one place I like to start is with Keywords. They seem to help define and shape the rest of the story you are telling about your business.

Keywords are specific descriptive words that indicate to a search engine such as Google or Bing what a website is about. They are very specific and to the point and worked in to key locations on a website.

One particular pitfall I have seen a lot is the descriptive copy never specifically says what the business does. For example, a business will explain all the reasons they take care of a client or customer. They explain their work ethic, or history, experience, and ability to recognize top quality… All of this is said and they never mention they sell hot dogs, or it’s mentioned at the very end of the content of the site.

I believe this pitfall is easy to fall into because no one wants to be overtly obvious, or cliche about their business. Being perceived as lacking original thought or creativity doesn’t help. After all, if the logo is cleverly spelled out in the shape of a hot dog, is it really necessary to explain there are hot dogs for sale? The short answer is, yes. Search engines, as smart as they are, are not great at picking up on hidden meaning or reference.

(Insert meme of Commander Data ironically not getting a joke.)

The process of finding your main keywords is as simple as crafting a one sentence “elevator speech”. If you could put what you do summed up into one sentence, what would it be? For example: “I develop high quality cheese graters for busy chefs to streamline their food prep process.” From this you have keywords like “high quality cheese graters”, “busy chefs”, and “streamline food prep process”.

There are many tools out on the web that can help, but one of my first is Google Trends: https://trends.google.com
It is a powerful tool that can give you insight on who is searching for a keyword and it can also provide other terms that are related. This insight is important because it can show you what people are looking for related to your business. These other suggestions are good to work into your content.

For example, at the time of this writing I put in the keyword “hairstyle” and a related topic that pulled up was “Marie Osmond New Hairstyle”. This lets you know that this topic in particular is searched a lot in this time frame. If you are in the fashion/hairstyle business, this might be a good topic for a blog. The idea is this lets you comment on something happening in the fashion industry that people are interested in knowing about. I am not in the hairstyle business, so I have no idea if this is a good idea, but I hope my point comes across.

The main places to put your keywords are:

  1. In the title of your website. This shows up in the browser tab at the top of the browser. Usually your website name goes here, but you can add in keywords at the beginning.
  2. Make sure they are in the description of the website. The description is usually a hidden portion of the site that is made for search engines. If you are using WordPress, many themes give you the option for adding this description in the theme options.
  3. Every page should have at least 1 “h1” tag with your keywords worked into it. If you are unfamiliar with the basics of HTML, you can do a search for “h1 tag in HTML”. They are used to make a heading for a section of your website stand out. For example, the title of your blog should be an “h1” tag.
  4. Every image you post in your site should have “alt tags” with keyword descriptors. If you have a picture of a red car driving on a country road, the image should have an alt tag that says exactly that.
  5. You want to make sure your keywords show up in the first paragraph of the text you are putting together for a page.

There are many more strategies to this subject and the rabbit hole of SEO goes very deep, but I hope this brief article helps you get started. If you ever need help or suggestions on where to go from here, you can always reach out to us. We love helping people succeed!