How to use keywords in a good way

Once you've chosen the right keywords for your website, it's important to use them wisely. Here we have listed some tips on how to use keywords in a good way.

Write for people, not robots.

Search engines are getting smarter and are being designed to mimic human behavior. Write coherently and interestingly. If visitors find your site useful, you'll get more and longer visits - and search engines perceive your site as useful.

Don't overdo it.

Don't think that you can "trick" the search engine and repeat the keywords over and over again (as used to be the case). Nowadays, excessive use is considered spam and you will be penalized for it. Instead, focus on relevant keywords that you use to write useful texts. Think about what you would want to read about the topic if you were a customer.

Keyword density of 2-3 percent.

To avoid overdoing it, you can evaluate keyword density. This is the percentage of the number of times the word appears on a page. If the page has 200 words on a page and the keywords are used 20 times, the density is 10 percent. Try to keep this at 2-3 percent.

Keywords in titles

Titles on the website and subpages should not exceed 70 characters. In addition, each page should have a unique page title.

Name of photo

Photo names should be specific and descriptive. For example, heimelaga-keramikk-oslo is better than sideid10 or IMG_01. Use only letters, numbers, underscores and hyphens. The words can be separated with a hyphen. Remember to add the keyword that should be in focus where it makes sense.

Structure your pages

Help visitors to the website to navigate around quickly and easily. Therefore, let the titles be explanatory and mark them in "heading 1".
If you have several titles on a page, let the titles down the page have H2 or H3. This will help the search engines to understand the content of the page. Vary the text in the titles and make them short and concise.

Tip: never more than 1 H1 per page. Important.

In the body text, try to include the most important keywords in the first few sentences. Repeat the keyword, but only where it makes sense. Feel free to vary the order of the keywords, e.g. "building design" and "design a building".

Check the website for dead links.

When you add a link to your own content, make sure that the text you link from is relevant. For example, links with the words "v-neck t-shirt" are better than "click here".

One keyword per page

To demonstrate relevance to search engines, try to focus on one keyword per page. Use the keyword in the page title, URL (page address), headline, body text and image file name of a page. 

Images and alt text

For images, see Squarespace's image best practices to make sure your website is optimized for visitors and search engines.

It's important to include 'alt text', which is a short description of an image. Adding 'alt text' to images is good for SEO and makes the website more accessible to people who use screen readers. 

The best way to optimize 'alt text':

• Create 'alt text' that is short (usually 12 characters or less)

• Be descriptive and helpful. How would you describe the image to people who can't see it?

For more help, visit Squarespace's overview for adding alt text to images.

Tips: For Google image search results, Google prefers .jpg over .png or .gid file types. 

Paid search

Paid searches are when you buy an ad that appears in search results in Google or Bing. They are placed at the top of search results for specific keywords and are labeled with the word 'ad'. Although these can certainly generate traffic to the website, they do not contribute directly to the website's ranking in the search engine, but contribute traffic to the website, which in turn is positive for the search engine.

When will you see results?

It can take time for changes to take effect. Search engine optimization is a long-term, continuous process and ranking is affected by many factors.

Focus on good content and strategic use of keywords, and go to Analytics and Google Search Keywords to keep up to date on how your keywords are performing so you can adjust your keyword strategy.