One of the oldest and most confusing facets of marketing on the web is the decision to use– or not use– keywords. With the constant changes in search algorithms and the desire to be placed as high as possible in the search engines, everyone from SEO professionals to joe-average-business-owner are looking for the right key words and how to use them.
What we’ve found that works is to use stacked keywords in your meta information and follow this up with strategic placement of those keywords in the product or category body text of your webpage.
The strategy is as follows:
- Come up with whole phrases that describe your products and services. For instance, our Flexi Display System is a “modular trade show display”. Sure, it’s a trade show display. Sure, it’s modular. Sure, it’s a modular display. By using these four words together, we’re giving the keyword the power of all four words. Any combination of those words used by a searcher will come up in results.
- Put these phrases in both the meta description and meta keywords of any page you’re on.
- Use these phrases in the text of the page. For instance, you could start your opening sentence with “We find that our flagship product, the Flexi modular trade show display, has the power and simplicity of a pop-up system with the configurability of a much more complex system.” By making a statement like this, you are not only reinforcing the keywords you’re using but also working them into a statement that is written for humans, not search engines.
This strategy has several advantages:
- Because the content is written for humans and not search engines, the search spiders won’t discount your site for “keyword stuffing”.
- The three-prong approach gives you the keyword density you desire.
- Because you’re using stacks of keywords, any of those words counts in the searchable word index (in any combination)
- These keywords are often picked up in combination with other keywords.
There’s been much debate over whether Meta information is still relevant. The truth is, no one knows. What we do know is that it can’t hurt, especially when using it in the manner described above. As long as you avoid keyword stuffing and write your pages for people and not spiders, you should find great success in stacked keyword placement.
