In a recent MoreVisibility YouTube Video, I discussed the elements of a page’s content that play the biggest roles in SEO. For today’s blog post, I’ll be digging a little deeper into that topic and expanding on my answer to a very common question that we receive from clients: “What is more important, Keyword Density or Keyword Placement?”

To say that “keyword placement” is more important than “keyword density” is more of a relative than an absolute statement. However, I believe it is much easier to “streamline” your SEO process by ensuring that the chosen primary keyphrase for a page is utilized in all of the key areas of the meta data AND in the content and anchor text for a page.

Keyword placement is essential when writing the content for a page because the search engines will assign a great deal more weight to a keyphrase because of where it’s placed. For instance, of the Titles, Descriptions and Keywords meta tags, the Title tag is given the most weight by Google. Anything placed in the title tag (preferably at the beginning) tells Google that this page’s primary focus is this word and they will typically serve that page in search results for that term.
The Descriptions meta data is the “ad copy” for the page and can be very effective in attracting people to click on the link to get to your page. The more compelling these 155 or so words are, the better the click-thru Rate. The general consensus is that the words contained in the Descriptions meta tag are not used as a factor in ranking by Google; I myself believe this to be naïve; until Google officially says that, treat any words contained in descriptions as a ranking factor and they should contain the primary keyphrase for the page.

The keywords meta data is ignored now, but may be used in the future by Bing, Yahoo and Google, so it’s probably worth at least including the primary keyphrase for the page in that tag.

Anchor text is the word(s) that you click on to open the hyperlink. Anchor text is weighted (ranked) highly in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. This is why it is essential to always use the appropriate anchor text within any links leading to other pages on your site. For instance, if you are referencing an interior page in a blog post, include the keyword elements you are targeting for the destination page in the clickable links leading to that page. In this blog post, if I wanted to reference another blog post I wrote, I would link to it like so: Why you are Shooting Yourself in the Foot by not Employing H1 Tags for SEO.

Lastly, there is of course the actual plain, text content on the page itself. In terms of keyword density, try to aim for around 2-4%, but do not sacrifice the narrative quality for the sake of SEO. Put simply, if a block of text looks “spammy” and confusingly written to the user, it will look that way to the search engines as well.

In one of the latest MoreVisibility YouTube videos, I explained the importance of utilizing your page headlines for SEO Purposes. Entitled “H1 Tags for SEO“, I talked briefly about ensuring that your page headlines are properly using the H1 tag.

It is the general consensus that Header tags are the 2nd most important tag next to the title. As much as possible, ensure that the text in the H1 tag is the same as your title tag; that level of redundancy between your Titles and your H1 for the page will send a signal to the search engines that the  page is about a specific keyword.

Use other tags (h2 tags, h3 tags etc.) if you need multiple headers. This will ensure that the search engines know that anything wrapped in the H1 is much more important than other headers (or sub-headers) used on a page. Also, make sure to not abuse your H1 tags. Don’t put whole paragraphs in a header and don’t use multiple h1 headers on the same page. This will seriously dilute their effectiveness and could get you penalized with Google.

Some have said in the SEO community that the H1 tag is not given as much weight by Google anymore. However, until Google officially says anything about specifically ignoring an element on a page (like they did with the keywords meta tag), it is safe to assume that using the H1 tag for the primary keyphrase on the page is good for SEO.

Every time I am in need of a new recipe, I always turn to the same place, Google, regardless of how many cookbooks I own. Google has just made my quest for excellent recipes even easier. If you go to Google and search for a specific food or recipe, such as chicken parmesan, blueberry pie, or even pomegranates, you will see pretty typical search results within the body of the page. You may see things like a Wikipedia listing, food websites, Google images, and recipes all mixed into those results. However, if you are interested in seeing recipes only, you can now easily do just that by clicking the “Recipes” link located on the left hand side of the page. This will take you to Google’s Recipe View.

Below is a Recipe View for chicken parmesan.

What’s great about this new feature is that if you know you have limited time or specific ingredients, you can filter the results by cook time and ingredients. If you are counting calories, you can filter by the number of calories as well.  For those who are all too familiar with flipping through pages and pages of search results to find a recipe that suits your palate and lifestyle, this feature will make your life a bit easier.

For website containing recipes, this is certainly a good feature for you!  As you may expect, however, there is some work required. In order for your recipes to show within the Recipe View and have the opportunity to display rich snippets (introduced in the spring of 2010), you will need to do some coding work. There is quite a bit of information from Google about rich snippets and how to mark up recipe information for you to reference.  Following these instructions will enable your recipes to display in the search results with rich snippets or display in the Recipe View, but it will not guarantee that the markup on a page will be used. 

Try Recipe View to find something new for dinner tonight, or start working on modifying your website’s pages to help them stand out from the rest.