Are Keywords Still Important When it Comes to SEO?

However, keywords aren’t completely dead and are still in many ways the backbone of SEO. They just have to be approached differently. Let’s take a look at how the role of keywords has changed when it comes to search engine optimization.

Keyword Placement

Google still needs the use of text, and therefore, keyword placement still plays a major role when it comes to search engine rankings. However, keyword placement will do more for your site than keyword stuffing or keyword rich backlinks.

Placing your main keywords in your title and headers is still an important part of any on page SEO marketing strategy, and this probably will be the case for years to come, unless Google makes a huge change in the way pages are indexed. Title tags play an essential part in search results, and poorly optimized title tags will always yield negative results.

Google still gives priority to key areas, such as meta information and headers, followed by copy and navigation last. It is therefore capital that you optimize these key areas with a variety of keywords so that tags across your site do not become redundant.

6 Ways to Speed Up Your Site

The load time of websites is one of the most important factors affecting its usability; most Internet users will just skip a site altogether if it fails to load within a couple of seconds. Below you will find the summary of the “Speed Up Your Site” series. Those are simple yet effective ways to make sure that your website is running fast. You can click on each point to read the article with comments from the readers.

1. Optimize Images: always use the “Save for the web” feature included on image editing software. Images represent the heavier load on virtually any website so make sure you are optimizing them. Alternatively you can also turn to an online image optimizer.
2. Image Formats: apart from optimizing images it is important that you choose the right format. JPEG format is suitable for photographs or true-color images. The GIF format should be used with flat-color images like logos or buttons. PNG works very similar to GIF but it supports more colors.
3. Use a Slash on Your Links: when a user opens a link on the form “http://www.domain.com/about” the server will need to figure what kind of file or page is contained on that address. If you include a slash (/) at the end of the link the server will already know that this is a directory page, reducing the load time of the site.
4. Optimize Your CSS: most websites are designed with CSS nowadays. Make sure to aggregate and clean your CSS. CleanCSS is an online tool that will merge similar selectors, remove useless properties and remove the whitespace from your code.
5. Reduce the HTTP Requests: when opening a web page every object (images, scripts and the line) will require a round trip to the server. This latency can add several seconds to the load time of your site. Make sure to reduce the number of objects and to combine CSS files and scripts together.
6. Use the Height and Width Tags: many people forget to add the Height and Width tags on image codes. Those tags will make sure that the browser knows the size of the image before loading it. The result is that it will reserve a spot for the images while loading the rest of the page, speeding up the whole process.