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CHAPTER 8

8. Keywords

In many of the factors, the concept of "keyword" and "keyword phrase" plays a leading role.
Keywords are the words that a user enters into the search bar of the search engine. The search
engine then searches its database for web pages that have a direct or sometimes indirect rela-
tionship with the keyword and presents the results. These results are called the "organic search
results". Search engines search "broadly". This means that on the basis of the keyword, they also
search for derived words and sometimes also for synonyms. Broad also means that the search
engine interprets the word in its own way. For example, in the results of the keyword "shoes"
you will find "white shoes" and "old shoes". It is a fact that keywords have an important role
in search engine optimization. Your page is found on the basis of keywords. This means that
you have to pay a lot of attention to these keywords. This usually requires keyword research.

8.1 Where to place keywords

Keywords should not only be placed in the body text. Below are instructions on how to place
keywords. Make maximum use of them.

• In the title tag. Put the most important keywords in the front of the tag.
• In the description tag. Put the most important keywords in the front of the tag.
• In the url of the page.
• In the headers of the body text (H1, H2 etc.).
• In the body text (paragraph texts).
• In captions of photos and images.
• In the alt tags of photos and images.
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• In links on your page (the text of a link is the anchor text, more on this later).
• In the footer of the page (the footer is the bottom part of the web page).

8.2 Guidelines for using keywords

Texts on your page are primarily written for your visitors and not for the search engines. This
may conflict with the need to include keywords in the text. Moreover, excessive use of keywords
may lead to penalties. Follow the guidelines below when using keywords.

• Optimize a page for no more than 3 keywords or search phrases. If there is a lot of compe-
tition for the chosen keywords, limit it to 1 or 2.
• Ensure a keyword density of 3 to 8 percent of the total number of words on the page. There
are many online tools that can calculate the keyword density for you. All you have to do is
enter the url and the keywords and you will see the results immediately. If your keyword

6: An alt tag is a description of the image that is only read by the search engine. If the alt tag is created properly, the image can be found via
Google Images.

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