Keywords and How to Make Them Work for You
Optimizing the use of keywords on your website is one way to help increase your search engine optimization (SEO). Follow these three simple strategies to ensure your target audience has a better chance of finding you.
Before writing your web copy, or at the outset of a copy revision, make a list of 15-20 keywords and phrases (KW&P). Think about what a person within your target market would type into a search engine when looking for a product or service like yours. If you are a locally-based business make sure to use local language such as, “in Virginia Beach”. Additionally, you want to be as specific as possible. If you are a small business, it’s best to use KW&P that have low to moderate competition. Be a big fish in a small pond.
When you write your web copy you certainly need to make sure that the copy makes sense to the reader, but it also needs to make sense to search engines. It’s most important to work in your KW&P into:
Your primary, secondary and tertiary headings. (In this order.)
Your photographs and images. Do this by including keywords in the names of your files and make sure to use hyphens in between each word. For example, “candy-store-in-virginia-beach”. In Squarespace, you can easily change your filename once you’ve uploaded the file.
Your SEO page descriptions. “SEO” is a featured tab within each page. Fill our Squarespace’s “page description” prompt using your KW&P.
Finally, when you work in your KW&P, make sure not to use them in overly repetitive ways, even in your image and page descriptions. In order to keep the search engines happy, you need to describe things like an actual person would too. Work in those KW&P, but strike a balance with your word choice.
