To round off our SEO Strategies Series on choosing the right keywords for your website and landing pages, I’ve listed the frequently asked questions (FAQs) we regularly receive about how to incorporate keywords within your website pages – as well as the answers.

How many times should I use my keywords in the page copy?

Rather than focus on how many times you should use each keyword per page, focus instead on incorporating the keyword where it makes sense to do so. For example, if you sell vacation packages, and you’re optimizing a page for “Cabo San Lucas vacation packages,” instead of writing, “We specialize in resort vacation packages,” use this keyword-rich phrase: “We specialize in Cabo San Lucas resort vacation packages.”

It’s also a good practice to include your main keyword in the page headline and sub-heads if possible. However, consider your readers. You may want to use a powerful headline that pulls people into the page but doesn’t include your keyword. (Remember that our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes a real-time multivariate testing engine – you can test various headlines to see which one converts the most visitors.)

What is “anchor text” and why is it important?

Anchor text is simply hyperlinked words. For example, in this phrase, “try our free 30-day demo,” the anchor text is “free 30-day demo.” Google and other search engines deem the words in linked text to be somewhat important, which is why it pays to use your keywords as anchor text – and why it’s even better if other sites link to your site and include your keywords in their anchor text.

It’s also why you don’t want to hyperlink something like, “Download your free report here.” The word “here” has no SEO value whatsoever!

Should I optimize for my brand names? I’ve heard it’s a waste of time to do this.

Definitely optimize for your brand names and for each of the services you offer. For example, if you provide outsourced IT, develop pages that address the specific types of services you offer within outsourced IT and optimize each of those pages based on the phrases people are using to find companies like yours.

A company offering IT outsourcing might have pages that describe remote diagnostics and trouble-shooting, disaster recovery, computer security services, network integration and management, IT consulting, email servers and support, etc.

{Warning: Self-serving FAQ} All of this sounds complicated. Does the Yield Software Web Marketing Suite help me with these SEO tasks?

Yes.  Yield Software’s fully integrated Web Marketing Suite automates the time-consuming chore of optimizing your website. For example, Yield has built a library of automated analyses to test web pages for adherence to generally accepted search engine optimization best practices. The software then ensures those pages have the highest probability of attaining top natural search engine rankings. For each analysis, Yield provides a full explanation of the best practice, recommends a solution and, in certain instances, automatically resolves the problem.

If something on your page isn’t up to par – i.e. you don’t have any anchor text – the software alerts you.

Be sure to try our 30-day no-risk free demo to see how much time you can save – as well as ratcheting up the marketing effectiveness of your site.