What To Avoid In Your Redesign: Forgetting to Identify and Include Commonly Searched Keywords

In our continued efforts to make sure your re-design process goes as smoothly as possible, we need to talk about another mistake commonly forgotten about. We’ve discussed it often throughout other blogs because it is an important element of SEO. We’re talking about keywords my friend. It may seem like a small blip on the map, but proper keyword placement in your website has the power to lift you high in search rankings.

The rule of thumb used to be to stuff your content with keywords in order to produce fast results that will take you to the top of search results. Don’t catch yourself living in that bygone era anymore. Today, if you keyword stuff, your credibility and rankings will likely take a major hit. In 2012, Google launched an algorithm to strongly penalize sites that contained too many poorly placed keywords. Now, this doesn’t mean you have to get rid of them altogether. Keywords are still important. If you do your job correctly and write high-quality content, your keywords will fit naturally into your pages. 

If you find yourself breaking out into a light sweat while reading this because you are guilty of this very mistake, don’t worry. It’s simply time for you to do a thorough read through of your site and check for this issue. The number one rule to remember is that your content needs to read well for the human audience first, search engines second. With that being said, you’re going to have to take the tedious task of reading through all your content and ask yourself one question: does this read well for humans? If it starts sound like a bunch of technical jargon to please the search engines, it’s time for a rewrite. Remove any and all keywords that don’t fit naturally into the content. 

Not sure how many keywords to include? Here’s a pretty handy tip to follow: each page should have about one specific keyword that you want to focus on. You can include that keyword 1-3 times naturally throughout the page content. Just remember to also include this keyword in your page title, meta description, and H1 text if deemed necessary.