Back in February, I wrote up a blog post discussing how to develop a keyword strategy for SEO. In that article, I discuss how keyword-spamming has changed how you should select your keywords. To recap: a long time ago, website owners were putting scores of keywords in their keywords meta tag - often keywords that were irrelevant to the content on the page itself. Search engines quickly picked up on this, and realized that website owners aren't the best source of information when deciding what a specific page should rank for (they are after all, bias). So search engines began placing less emphasis on this meta tag and looking at other, more accurate ways to rank content.

I've long advised my friends and clients that the keywords meta tag is optional (and can be used as good practice) because its most likely ignored. Others have suspected the same for quite some time. So I was happy to see a post on the Official Google Webmaster blog that confirmed that Google does not use the keyword meta tag for web ranking.

Here's a quick snippet from that post:

Q: Why doesn't Google use the keywords meta tag?

A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called "off-page" factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

And here is the video. Matt Cutts of Google also addressed the issue on his blog (which I highly reccomend you subscribe to if you're interested in SEO).

Keep in mind - this doesn't mean the concept of keywords (short phrases) are useless. In fact, keyword researching is critical to a successful SEO strategy. But the actual keywords meta tag does nothing to help your position with Google. Instead, you should use your keyword research to build relevant content, a strong description tag, and good anchor text in your backlinks and internal link structure.

Once you've researched your keywords, it's important that you place them in the right places. Search engines will place a different weight on keywords depending on where they are located and how they are used. Below are the top five places to put your keywords for optimal search engine placement. Suggestions are on a page-by-page basis.

Title Tag

The title tag appears at the very top of your browser window – just above where you type in website addresses.

The title tag is the ultimate indicator of what is on that page, and should definitely contain your primary keyword. Here are some tips:

• Place your primary keyword towards the front of your title tag if possible
• Keep your title tag short when possible
• Avoid words that don't help your search rankings
• Keep your title tag relevant and not spammy. If in doubt, always lean towards a more natural title tag

If you want to rank for the keyword 'Content Management', a title like 'How to Update Your Own Website' is not helpful. It doesn't contain your primary keyword anywhere. You could use 'Compass Web Publisher – the easiest Content Management Tool Available', and although it's an improvement, your keyword is at the end of the title tag and only makes up 2/9 = 22% of your title tag. You want to move the keyword earlier in the title tag if at all possible, and ensure it is not diluted by a lot of other words that aren't helping your search rankings.

The title tag goes between the < head > and < /head > tags in your site. If you are using the Compass CMS, you can type in your page title in the "Page Title" field shown below.

The Address to the Page (URL)

Next is the actual web address to the page you are optimizing. This appears just below the page title in your browser.

If you want to rank for 'Web Based Content Management System', you would probably want a url to that page that looked like 'www.compasswebpublisher.com/web-based-content-management-system' or similar. You can achieve this by setting the filename of the page to your keyword. If you are using Compass, type your desired address into the "Page URL" box (see screenshot from previous step). You can also achieve this by registering a domain that has your keyword(s) in it.

Heading Tags

If you're not familiar with heading tags, check out your favorite word processor. You'll see a heading 1, heading 2...all the way down to a heading 6. Heading 1 is the largest, while each heading after that gets smaller and smaller. The heading emphasizes the content that follows – so search engines place heavy emphasis on the words found in heading tags. Because a heading 1 is larger than a heading 2, it holds more weight in the search engines.

You'll want to follow the same general rules for your headings as outlined in the title tag, but don't duplicate your title tag. Change it up slightly. Your primary keyword should be in your heading 1 tag – and you should typically only have one heading 1 tag per page. Heading 2 and 3 can be used for subtopics – and are great places to include your secondary keywords.

Heading tags are in the format < h1 > where the 1 can be either a 1 or 6 for the various types of headings. If you're using Compass, you can instead highlight the desired heading text and select a heading as shown below.

Body Text

The content on your page should contain your keywords, related keywords, and synonyms if possible. Synonyms or related keywords are critical because search engines are able to recognize related sets of words.

Test: Try out Google Sets and enter in 'Human Resources' and 'Hiring' to generate a Large Set. It will return back words such as recruitment, training, workforce management, payroll software and more. A short set will give you fewer, but more relevant, words. If you were trying to rank for 'Seattle Human Resources', it would be best if you included some of these related words throughout your copy. Google Sets tells you exactly what other keywords Google considers to be related to your words. When it finds them on your page, especially in close proximity to your primary keyword, it realizes your page is highly relevant and you'll rank much better.

Links

When you link to one of your pages, don't make the words 'click here' the actual link. Try something more relevant like: 'We offer Human Resource Consulting in the Seattle, WA area'. What's most important is the text that makes up the link, but also the words immediately surrounding the link (notice the Seattle, WA). That's because the words immediately surrounding the link put the link in context for the search engines. They place a high value on it.

To see just how powerful links are, try this. Go to Google and search for the term 'click here.' You'll notice the first link is for downloading Adobe Acrobat Reader.

That page on Adobe's site doesn't have the words 'click here' anywhere on it – but because so many sites say, 'If you need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader, click here', Google will rank that page first for the search term. In this case, links from other websites are alone  determining that this page is the most relevant to your search.

Links don't refer just to links within your site, but also other sites that link to you. The text found in links is a very critical but often overlooked part to a strong search engine optimization strategy.

Here's a link to a very good article with a more detailed list of places to place your search engine keywords with lots of screenshots. There are plenty of places to place your keywords – the five above are what I've found to be the most important.

The bounce rate is a critical, but often unknown, website statistic that every business owner should be carefully monitoring so that they can continually improve the effectiveness of their website. The bounce rate tells you the percentage of visitors that leave your website without ever interacting with it. This means they go to your homepage (for example) - and then leave your website without going to any other pages on your site.

Oftentimes, bounces occur in less than 3-5 seconds. Here's what the bounce rate statistic looks like in Compass' stats (although most stats programs should have something similar):

In this site, 20% of visitors are bouncing. Is this good or bad, and how do you go about reducing your bounce rate?

In the early days of the web, putting in 200 keywords on your page was the norm. I tracked down my company website from 2001 - and here are the keywords I was using:

Graphics, Web Design, Web Site,  Web Page, Frontpage, Design, 3d, Site, Business, e-commerce, entrepeneur, Small Business,  html, authoring, site creation, layout, style sheets, hypertext markup language, web, home page, website, media, communications, animation, marketing, page, designers, mulitmedia, scripts, web sites, html design, PHP, Perl, web hosting,  hosting, hosting services, computer, web pages, web design professionals, web page authoring, graphic, new website, new web site, Web master,  web page designer, web site designer, webmaster, webmasters, web masterst, web designing, Professionals, dhtml

Yes - that was on ONE page! The sheer volume of keywords became popular because search engines used to actually use this information to rank pages. Now - keywords are virtually useless when used in this way. Instead, there is a much better way to choose and place keywords on your site - and it's proven to be very effective for me. I call it the 3-1-2 rule.

I hear it all the time. "We'd like to point 57 domains to our website to help boost our search rankings." Godaddy offers domains for dirt cheap. A cup of your favorite venti triple-shot insert-favorite-flavor-here cappucino probably costs more these days. It's no wonder you may be tempted to buy up a ton of domains and point them all to your website - especially when you are looking at your site stats and trying to find ways to get your traffic numbers up. Here are the common reasons I hear for wanting this:

More domains  = more traffic
The idea goes like this: 1 website = x amount of traffic. 80 websites then, must equal 80x the traffic. This is a common misconception. Just because the domains are out there doesn't mean  you are increasing your chances of someone finding your site. You still have to promote that domain like you would your primary domain.

If I have more domains, they are more likely to get picked up by Google
Google will pick up on it alright. But probably not the way you'd like them to pick up on it. Google is clear about their policies - deliberately creating duplicate content is not cool. This ends up being (in my opinion) a form of spamming. The search engine algorithms are far too advanced to risk this - they will find you!

What other options do you have?

To start: focus on content. A website that goes stale and is never updated will usually not do as well in the rankings anyways. Make it a goal of yours to update your website 4-5x per week - even if it's just a paragraph or two. If you put the same amount of energy into updating your site as you would into brainstorming, purchasing, and pointing 100 domains to your existing websites, you should see better results anyways.

I'll cover specific instructions to improve your search engine rankings in future posts so you have detailed alternatives. For now, avoid pointing all those domains to your site. It could actually end up hurting your rankings.

One last note: There are certain instances where a few domains wouldn't actually hurt you. If you own example.com - pointing example.net there probably isn't going to be too detrimental. The search engines are smarter than penalizing you for this. The other instance is if you are using the various domains for marketing campaigns - but I would definitely encourage building out separate sites with unique content rather than pointing them all to once place.