I’m making this post because I been guilty of forgetting some of the fundamentals of keyword SEO. So I figured that if I was going to give myself a refresher then I should share it with you, as well, so let’s go down the keyword SEO checklist.

Keyword SEO

Title

Just using your keywords in your title will put your content ahead of a lot of your competitors. Competitors is actually a generous term for those webmasters considering they don’t know the first thing about SEO, but remember to start there. Your keyword doesn’t have to make up the entire title, and don’t churn out an awkward post title just for the sake of twisting your keyword in, but try to get it in there and make it an attractive and persuasive read to encourage people to read.

Remember that people will see your title in the SERPs if you rank well for your keyword, so that title (and description) should entice them to click through. Incidentally, keep this post on how to write a great title in mind for just that.

Description

Include your keyword in the description of your page, as well. Do yourself a favor and if you don’t have a WordPress theme (like Optimize Press) which makes adding your customized title, description, and keywords very simple for you, then grab the free All in One SEO Plugin which is taken from my post on the best WordPress plugins 2012 which includes many more free and essential plugins to have in this day and age.

Body

The body is where you want to pay extra attention to your keyword SEO. In the actual content/post of your page you want to include your keyword as well as LSI keywords to mix it up without going overboard (see what is the optimal keyword density).

Remember that making it look natural is the key. Going overboard with using the same keyword over and over again in your content looks unnatural and like you’re trying to manipulate the search engines; not to mention it hasn’t worked in over a decade.

Images

Remember to put your keywords in the alt text and title tags of your images, as well. This is very simple to do in WordPress. I’ve already mentioned WordPress a couple of times. I like it because it’s so intuitive and great for SEO. Check out my complete “how to use WordPress” tutorial video and 5 ways WordPress helps you rank better for more information.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is important in on AND off site keyword SEO. Make sure that whenever you’re creating a link to a page on your site, regardless of whether that’s from another page on your site or a page on someone else’s site, use one of your keywords as the anchor text which points to that page. This significantly helps identify your content to the search engines and will help you rank, particularly (and obviously) from a high ranking site.

Also, if you’re creating a lot of links to a page on your site for the keyword you’re trying to rank for, don’t use that same keyword over and over again as the only anchor text you ever point towards it. This was the element which I forgot and again this can look unnatural just as if you’re stuffing the keywords on your own page. Therefore remember to have a few variations of your keyword.

Focus

While you should vary your anchor text, I recommend generally trying to target just one keyword phrase per page of your own content. It may seem enticing and a time saver just squeezing and targeting 5 attractive keywords into the same page and hoping to rank for them all with that one page, but remember that you want everything to look natural, and it certainly won’t look natural if you’re squeezing 5 keyword phrases into your page’s title, for example.

And yes you can and should still use LSI keywords mixed in with that main keyword to keep things natural looking and to avoid oversaturation.