Keywords on the Homepage

One of the most important factors of search engine optimization is the amount of keywords on the homepage. You see, when web crawlers come along and scour the website they’re going to look at the homepage first to determine what the website is all about.

When the Google spiders crawl the homepage, they are looking for the keywords related to the industry that the website says it is in. So for example, this website that you’re on currently has web design listed ten times or so on the homepage. This gives the web crawlers a lot of ammunition when figuring out how to rank the website.

It’s important to do a test on how many keywords are on the homepage and if you find it to be lacking, perhaps only one or two or even none then you need to increase the amount of keywords that are naturally appearing in the homepage. What do I mean by naturally appearing? It doesn’t work to just stuff a bunch of keywords out of context. If you just list keywords in a bunch on your site, not only will it not work, but it may actual penalize the website.

What’s most important is that the keywords make sense to the visitor who is reading the website. So we have things like Web Design Glossary and Web Design FAQs, these are actual pages that have value on them that you can click on but also have our keyword in them and are on the homepage.

A neat tool to figure out how many times your keyword appears on the homepage is Ctrl + F. This will bring up a search bar at the top of the screen in the upper right-hand corner, type in the keywords for your industry in the search box and hit Enter. So if you are a Realtor in Billings put in “realtor Billings” or “real estate Billings” and search and see how many times the keyword is on the homepage.

After this is completed, you can move on to other pages in the website like the About page, Services page and/or Contact page for example and make sure that those have keywords as well. It might not always be possible to have a lot of keywords on certain pages, especially pages like the Contact page, but try to get in at least one or two on these pages as well. This will really help out in your search engine optimization and competition against everyone else who’s in your industry (another good tip is to look up the industry leaders in your area and search their homepage to see how many times the keyword appears on their site).

Have questions about how to pull this off for your website? Contact us in our contact form me located here or call us at 406-208-8733.