Giving Prominence to Your Keywords
09.06.2010Keyword prominence can be defined as the placement of a given keyword in the HTML code of a web page. The higher placement of a particular keyword in the page is, the more value that word is assigned by the search engine, when that word coincides with a keyword search performed by a search engine user. Unlike keyword density, the old and overused SEO technique, keyword prominence is something you should always keep in mind.
If you manage it right you will reach:
- better rankings across all search engines;
- higher crawl and traffic rate;
- improved snippets in SERPs (and thus better clickthrough), etc.
There are two basic ways to achieve keyword prominence:
1) Make sure the most important element is in close proximity to the opening <body> tag in the page source code;
2) Use your keyword in the SEO-sensitive components of the page: title, anchor text, bold text, etc.
So how can you make one keyword in the web page prominent over others?
- Spotlight the most significant keywords of the page by means of basic compositional structure: ensure that you take full advantage of H1, H2, H3 tags to make your page structure well-marked to a search bot.
- Place your keyword-rich content as close to the beginning of the page as possible, and use CSS to arrange all page elements the way the web designer likes it (a good old SEO technique, called source ordered content or SOC).
- Using your keywords, create the first paragraph so that it gives a short summary of the whole page content (A copywriting technique used in journalism). If you own a blog a very smart thing to do would be to let those short summaries show up on the home page, and the full content – on the single post page. This effective blogging technique eliminates duplicate content issue.
So don’t you ever let keyword prominence slip from your mind, and get in the habit of starting off your title tags with a relevant keyword rather than “Welcome to”.
