Keywords as part of SEO

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When it comes to SEO, one of the terms you will hear, most often repeated, is “keyword” or “keywords”. This is because they have an important and defining role when it comes to the success of your search engine optimisation. However, this role has changed dramatically over time, and keeping your keyword practices up to date is incredibly important. Here at Pumpkin Web Design, we are web marketing, web design, and SEO experts. As a result, we have produced this guide to keywords as part of SEO.

keywords as part of SEO

What are keywords and what do they do?

First of all, its important to understand what exactly keywords are, and what they can do.

Simply put, keywords are the word combinations your potential customers will use when they are searching for a product or service.

For example, if you wanted a plumber in Preston, what you might type into Google would be “plumbers Preston”. This would be the short tailed keyword combination. However, if you had a specific plumbing enquiry, you might Google “why do I have heating but no hot water?”. In this instance, this would bring up relevant content containing this phrase or a similar phrase, which would be your long tailed keyword.

As a result, keywords can direct traffic to your website and help your content and website to appear in the top rankings on the search engine results page.

How to use keywords

In the past, content writers would fill their content with keyword combinations just to drive traffic. However, when consumers realised the content was poor, they quickly left the site again.

Thankfully, Google has changed the playing field when it comes to keywords. As a result, the old practice of “keyword stuffing” is long dead. Instead, keywords are now researched before the content is written, and they will only be used where necessary. Less than 5 mentions of the same keyword is actually considered ideal for an article of around 1000 words.

Having said that there are some areas where using your keyword is important. This includes:

⦁ between the <h1> tags to create a heading
⦁ the first paragraph of your content
⦁ as image <alt> content

In summary

Keyword practices have changed from stuffing keywords into the content to carefully researching and using them thoughtfully. Keywords as part of SEO will remain important, even when we are all using speech search software. If you need professional SEO support to help your website grow, contact us at Pumpkin Web Design today.

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Pumpkin Web Design Ltd is a small and highly results driven digital agency working for like minded clients in Preston, Chorley, Southport, Blackburn, Burnley, Morecambe,Wigan, Manchester, London, Warrington, Blackpool, Lancaster, Leyland, Lytham St Annes, Bolton, Chester and the UK. Our services include web design, SEO, content marketing, video production, brand design and much more.