The second article in our SEO & Engagement series
It’s been a long time since keyword stuffing was considered to be a good idea in digital marketing. It’s more crucial than ever, however, to optimize your content to both attract search engines and engage site visitors/prospects. Here are some tips to help you balance the art and science of incorporating keywords, in order to create messaging that works on both levels.
Improve usability to boost SEO.
Always remember, above all else, your content needs to be naturally readable and engaging. This attention to usability is important to appeal to search engine crawlers as well as real live readers. Integrate keywords into your messaging as smoothly as you can in the interest of providing an optimal page experience. Also consider whether an alternate version of a keyword might improve flow for the reader while producing similar ranking results.
Give keywords breathing room for better flow.
Just as a laundry list of selling points can be tiring to read, so can a litany of keywords crammed together. Try to space out keywords to improve readability and comprehension, which will also encourage visitors and prospects to keep reading.
Find ways to escalate keywords to heads and subheads.
Working keywords into headlines can be especially challenging. But since web crawlers and people both tend to scan heads and subheads first, and search engines assign substantial weight to headline content, it can be very rewarding. See if you can work an important keyword into these lines, while keeping a benefit-oriented message front and center.
Don’t overburden your homepage.
Visitors are apt to discover your website in numerous ways through a variety of engagement channels and discovery paths. Look for opportunities across your site to incorporate important keywords on various pages — especially in content that resides within the first several tiers of your site infrastructure.
Anchor text should also be SEO-friendly. The anchor text that displays on the page for your various hyperlinks is also a valuable opportunity to incorporate keywords. The text should be succinct, meaningful and relevant to the target page it’s linking to — and not overstuffed with keywords.