Panda Update: Keyword Placement
In general, not much has changed concerning the placement of keywords. There was a time (several years ago) where things like keyword stuffing were pretty common because of how effective they were. These strategies haven’t worked for a while.
When creating posts, it helps to pay attention to the following criteria. Strategies differ depending on who you talk to, but these tips are the easiest to implement. If you haven’t done this to your existing pages, doing so now can help. Definitely keep these things in mind when creating new content.
Bear in mind that this strategy is normally used for individual articles and posts. The home page will have a variety of keywords on them because they will display your article titles and some content snippets. In general, the home page will be optimized for your main keyword and several other secondary keyword.
Here are the strategies you can use. Keep in mind that you may already know how to do this. In that case, just consider it a review. The Panda updated didn’t appear to change much.
Title. The keyword should appear in the title, preferably towards the front.
URL. Make sure the keyword appears in the URL for the article or post.
First paragraph. There is conflicting information about what to do next.
Some say that it is important to have the keyword in the first sentence. Other’s say that it doesn’t matter where in the first paragraph it is, as long as it’s there.
Body. The common thinking is to put the keyword once or twice in the body, depending on the length. If the article is only 200 words long or so, it probably doesn’t even make sense to put it in the body.
Conclusion. Just as with the first paragraph, there is some discrepancy.
Some believe you should put it in the first sentence of this paragraph, some say the last. Still, others believe that it doesn’t matter as long as it is in.
LSI. This stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and it basically indicates “the words that Google expects to see” for a certain topic or keyword. For example, if the keyword is fly fishing, Google will expect to see words such as fish, fishing rod, etc. Write naturally and this will happen anyway.
If you already have a strategy that works and is still working, stick with it. Also, this maybe isn’t news to you and could be a review. No matter what you do, the keyword should never be obvious. It should flow with the rest of the content or else it could be a turnoff.