Best Practices : Keyword Optimization & Synonyms

When optimizing your site for the search engines, you should spend some time in figuring out exactly what keywords, or what key phrases, you are going to target. Search engines are an excellent source of traffic, but in order to utilize them to their full potential, some effort is required.

A good combination of primary keyword selection supported by secondary keywords will ensure a well optimized page for that particular keyword. For e.g., Primary keyword for earning money online would be, "Make money online" and secondary keyword would be "Make money online with adsense"

Primary keywords appear on the most important areas like the header, footer, inbound anchor text, H1 tags, Meta tags etc. and are given much important. Primary keywords should be repeated with a certain amount of keyword density throughout the page. The reason why some keywords are considered primary is because those are the ones that are marketable online and has a niche market. Probably those are the ones that are not used by other sites and are yet to break into a niche.

The secondary keywords are given less important and support the primary keywords for its marketing. They are many a times combination of one or more keywords and can be used with or without more combinations at different places. They form the lesser proportion of keyword density. They are keywords that other sites have already optimized for and therefore may be difficult to break into the top 10 search engine page results.

Keyword variations and synonyms are to be taken in to consideration.

Keyword Variations - This is just another way of saying that not each Internet searcher uses the same words to find information. You need to think like your visitors and create some different variations of your targeted keyword phrase adding words at the beginning, the end, the middle, etc.

Keyword Synonyms - These are words that have similar meanings and the search engines are looking for word association within your content.

Well, It is possible to make a single web page rank for several search terms with good keyword research. Each page should ultimately have 1 primary keyword with a few other secondary keywords.  Once your page begins to rank, you will also find that you will receive traffic from other long-tail keywords.  Long-tail keywords are keywords that contain several words within the search, in which your website ranks for.  Long-tail keywords are not competitive, but if your page happens to mention a specific keyword that someone is searching for, it will rank very easy for that term.

Some best practices listed below:

• Determine your keyword phrases
• Sort by popularity
• Refine and combine keyword phrases
• Sort by popularity again (repeat steps 2 and 3 as needed)
• Write a title using your top two to three phrases
• Write a description meta tag
• Write a keywords meta tag
• Add keywords into key tags and attributes, and mix well