In my previous article, I spoke about how the only two things that really matter in an SEO campaign are keyword relevance and topic authority. This article aims to dive deeper into keyword relevance and explain some of the do’s and don’ts of on page SEO.

The first rule of building keyword relevance is that content is key. If you want to rank high for the keyword phrase, “Electric Bicycles”, your site needs to have some high quality content related to electric bicycles. If you don’t have any content on electric bicycles, create some. When planning a new web site or upgrading an existing one, the first thing I will do is map out the keywords I want to rank for and determine how much new content I will need to create. Once you have a clear map of what to add to your site, writing the content becomes easy. In order to become the primary authority on a given topic, you need to be the best online resource for it. We’re not creating content for the sake of creating content. We need to create content that makes our site deserve the number one position for the keywords we are going after.

After you have built a site that logically fits into the number one spot for your keywords, we need to make sure the search engines know what we’re about. The first thing a search engine will look at to determine where you belong is your title tag. Your title tags should contain the keywords you are going for on a particular page without looking like spam. Keep in mind that Google will only display the first 70 characters (about 8 words) of a title tag in the search engine results pages and people generally click on the words that they actually used for the search query. Because of this, you want to make sure that your most searched keyword for the page appears early on in the title tag. Let’s say you worked for Bob’s Bike Shop and again were going after the phrase “electric bicycles”. A good title tag for your electric bike page could look like this:

Electric Bicycles – Find an electric bike that fits your needs | Bob’s Bike Shop

This title tag has a call to action (find and electric bike that fits your needs) and targets two variations of your keyword phrase (electric bicycles and electric bike). Both keyword variations show up towards the front of the title tag so if a user searches for either phrase in Google, they would show up bold in the results which can create a higher click through rate. Most importantly, this title tag explains the content of the page and is not filled with keyword spam.

In addition to the title tag, you should also pay close attention to the heading tags, strong tags and emphasis tags. Your first heading tag on the page should be an H1 tag and contain your primary keyword phrase for the page. Additionally, if you want to bold or italicize any keywords on the page, use strong and em tags to do so instead of b or i.

The most important thing to keep in mind while doing this is to not over optimize your pages. If you write your content in a way that makes the most sense to your site visitors, you will be ok. Don’t add random heading tags and stuff your keywords in the middle of paragraphs in order to boost your keyword relevance. This tactic usually has the opposite effect that you are going for and makes your pages far less attractive to your site visitors.