Savvy Internet marketers know the importance of keyword targeting for ranking and usability, but as a refresher (and for you beginners out there) I thought I’d run down a list of various areas on the page where you can include your core keyword. It’s not a completely comprehensive list and I’m not going to bother with percentage of importance or how crucial it is to target these particular spots — this is just my opinion of areas to be mindful of and possibly include a keyword if you can, because it can potentially help with rankings and should provide a solid user experience. I’ll use “vintage clothes” as an example — it’s a pretty competitive term and currently has nearly 33 million search results.

Title Tag

I’d have the keyword first or close to the beginning of the title tag and keep the tag to about 65-70 characters so the entire tag can display in search results.

<title>Vintage Clothes, Indie Clothing and Great Styles | HipstersRUs.com</title>

Meta Description

While the meta description isn’t much of a ranking factor, it’s still a good place to include your keywords because search engines will bold the terms the user searched for, and if those terms are in your meta description they’ll help draw the user’s eyes to your search result. You can dynamically generate meta descriptions (for example, if you have an e-commerce site with millions of products and want to automatically generate descriptions for individual product pages) or leave them blank and let search engines pull what they feel is a relevant description for the page, but I think that if you can write up a meta description for certain core pages (e.g., the home page, your blog page, contact page, etc), you should control how those pages are being described to searchers.

Think of your meta description as an advertisement for your page — how will you craft it in order to entice a searcher to click on your result over 9 others being displayed? Make your description readable (don’t just list keywords one after another; they won’t help your rankings, anyway) and keep it to about 155 to 170 characters to avoid it getting cut off in the search results.

<meta name=”description” content=”HipstersRUs offers hip vintage clothes and indie-style clothing in impeccable quality and at affordable prices. We have great styles of vintage clothing in mint condition.”>

URL

It’s nice to have the keyword in your main URL if possible. Redwidgets.com is better for ranking than SpunkyMonkey.com, a brand that specializes in red widgets. Some engines seem to assign a bit of weight to keyword-centric URLs but even if they don’t (or claim not to), a URL with a keyword in it will probably get more keyword-centric anchor text than the brand would. If I linked to redwidgets.com and SpunkyMonkey.com using their URLs as the anchor text, redwidgets.com would likely have the edge in ranking for “red widgets” than SpunkyMonkey because the keyword’s already built into the anchor text.

That being said, if you’re building a brand and don’t have the keyword in your main URL but still want to rank for certain keywords, you can still have optimized URLs. For example:

http://www.hipstersrus.com/vintage-accessories

http://www.hipstersrus.com/vintage-dresses

http://www.hipstersrus.com/vintage-suits

You could potentially have a URL that’s hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing but that has its upsides and its downsides. One negative is that you’re possibly pitting two pages against each other, which we in the biz affectionately refer to as keyword cannibalization. If you have multiple pages that appear to target the same keyword (via duplicate title tags, thoughtless keyword repetition, similar URLs, etc), you’re forcing the search engines to choose what they feel is the most relevant page to display as a result for that keyword, and the downside is that what they choose may not be the page that you want ranking. You wouldn’t want to have something like hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing, hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing-1, hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing-2, etc, and attempt to rank all of them for the term “vintage clothing.”

However, if your home page is ranking for “vintage clothing” and you also have a page that talks about vintage clothing in some regard (maybe it’s a page of newly arrived clothing or you talk about where you acquire your vintage clothing), you could end up ranking both pages for that keyword — your home page as a top result and the vintage clothing page as an indented result. You’re occupying more search result real estate with your brand, which is great for your business.

Here’s a search result for “books”:

Amazon has two pages ranking for “books,” their books page and the home page. I mostly see indented results occur with the home page and a secondary page, so if you make certain that both pages aren’t exact dupes of each other and have unique content, you might end up ranking both for the same keyword.

Header Tag

There’s been talk that using keywords in your H1 tag used to be a bigger ranking factor but is now waning in importance from a pure ranking standpoint. However, I still think it’s a best practice to include your keyword in your header tags, if not for ranking reasons then at least for usability. If someone searched for “vintage clothing” and clicked on your result, they’ll probably expect to see the keyword they searched for on the page in some form or another. Header tags operate the same way as a standard outline, so just use them the same way. For example:

<h1>Widgets</h1>

yada yada yada

<h2>Red Widgets</h2>

yada yada yada

<h3>Sparkley Red Widgets</h3>

yada yada yada

<h3>Striped Red Widgets</h3>

yada yada yada

<h2>Blue Widgets</h2>

And so on. For our vintage clothing example, the following would be a good H1 tag for the home page:

<h1>Vintage Clothing at HipstersRUs.com</h1>

Body of Text

Don’t get all aggro and obsessed with keyword density and think, “Derr, I have to have a density of 23.78% in order to rank #1 for my keyword.” Just write natural copy and use your keyword where it makes sense. Be mindful but logical — if you have a page that repeats your keyword over and over again, users are going to wonder what the hell is wrong with you and a human editor might think you’re trying to spam your way into the SERPs.

Which reads better?

Vintage clothing at HipstersRUs.com. Vintage clothes men’s vintage suits women’s vintage dresses and great vintage styles. Our vintage clothes are affordable and stylish. We offer free shipping on vintage clothing orders over $50. Vintage clothes in great shape and styles.

Or this:

At HipstersRUs we offer stylish vintage clothing at affordable prices. Fashion trends come and go, but classic vintage looks always stand out. From the essential black dress to a sharp three-piece suit, we’ve got all sorts of vintage styles and clothes that look great without breaking the bank. Complete your outfit with HipstersRUs!

Internal Anchor Text

If you’ve got a page that you’re trying to rank for “red widgets,” it makes sense to link to it internally using “red widgets” as the anchor text instead of “here” or something of equally low value. Be mindful of how you link to pages in your navigation, via breadcrumbs, and contextually. For example, if HipstersRUs.com has a page that’s targeting “vintage dresses,” they’d obviously want to link to it whenever they mention the page using “vintage dresses” in their navigation, in blog posts, etc.

External Anchor Text

As with internal linking, you’ll want to have optimized anchor text for any links pointing to you from other web pages. Unfortunately, unlike internal linking you often don’t have control over how someone links to you (which is why, as previously mentioned, it is nice to have your keyword built into your main URL if you can). If someone’s linked to you using a less than ideal anchor text, you can try and contact that person and say that you appreciate the link and was wondering if he/she can change the anchor text for you. If you have any control of the link whatsoever, be sure to incorporate your keywords in the anchor text.

Ex. “I bought a super cute dress at HipstersRUs.com, which sells tons of vintage clothing.”

Social Networking Profiles

Another possible strategy is to include your keyword in your social profiles. While this won’t help your main page rank, I think it’s great to associate the brand with that keyword so that people associate the two with each other.

For example, if HipstersRUs.com had a Twitter profile, they could register “hipstersRus” as the URL but optimize the display name:

Twitter seems to limit names to about 20 characters, so you might need to be a bit creative. You could go with HipstersRUs or try to target keywords (in the above example, I went with “Hip Vintage Clothing”). In the description hit up the brand and your keyword within 160 characters (just like you would a meta description):

HipstersRUs is an online vintage clothing store specializing in vintage looks, styles & accessories at affordable prices. Our vintage clothes are chic and hip!

Try to work in the keyword if you build a custom Twitter background that includes contact info too.

With Facebook, you could create a page called “HipstersRUs Vintage Clothes”:

Target the keyword in your page description and when you post notes. Like I said, although this doesn’t have a primary effect on your page rankings, you’re branding yourself and strengthening the association between your brand and that particular keyword; that way, if someone later does a search for “vintage clothing” and sees your page in the search results (whether you’re in position #1, 4, or 10), she might recall your social media profile and may click on your result. Reinforcing the keyword continues to strengthen that bond so that when the person hears “vintage clothing,” they’ll think “HipstersRUs,” and vice versa.

Obviously, with all of the above strategies the most important thing is to be logical with how you use the keyword. You’re optimizing not just for search engines, but for your users too, and it’s better to be user-friendly than to be solely search-engine friendly. Thus, you want to be sensible, smart and strategic (none of this Malkovich Malkovich nonsense).

Here’s where I turn it over to you — how do you target your keywords? If I’ve missed any tactics or strategies, please share them in the comments below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed and follow 10e20 on Twitter.

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