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Improving Keyword Strength For SEO

September 13th, 2008

Before you start writing any content for your website or blog post, it’s a good idea to create a list of 10-15 keywords. Once the writing begins, be sure to use your keywords throughout the copy. The use of keywords will improve your search results when a search engine crawls your website. An easy way to further strengthen your keywords is to wrap them in <strong>keyword</strong> tags.

When a search engine, like google, crawls your website it will be drawn to your keywords wrapped in <strong></strong> tags more so then if you don’t use them. Let’s take a look at Cardeo’s blog description for an example of this technique in practice:

<h2><strong>Matt Lambert</strong> is a <strong>Web Designer</strong> based in North <strong>Vancouver</strong>, BC, Canada. <strong>Cardeo</strong> is his studio and <strong>blog</strong>.</h2>

Note that I have wrapped the following keywords with <strong></strong> tags as these are the terms I’m choosing to promote for my website and it’s content: Matt Lambert, Web Designer, Vancouver, Cardeo, and Blog. I have also wrapped the entire description in a <h2> tag which further increases the search-ability of the copy.

Now that we have the HTML code complete, we need to add some styles to the <strong></strong> tags. By default, the keywords wrapped within the tags will display as bold type. If you would like to turn this off, enter the following code into your style sheet:

strong {
font-weight: normal;
}

One problem you may run into is wanting to use the <strong></strong> tag to bolden your copy in another section of your website. If this is the case, there are a few solutions to the problem.

The first would be to wrap your description copy into a div tag and declare an ID or CLASS for the section. Here’s an example of the CSS and HTML where we are declaring an ID:

Another solution would be to use the <em> tag instead. It will have the same effect, so this may be a quick fix for you.

A third solution would be to attach, as I have done on cardeo.ca, the <strong> selector to your <h2> tag. The CSS for that looks like this:

That’s it, that’s all! I hope this tutorial has been useful. Please feel free to comment below on other ways of increasing keyword strength for your website.

Tags: CSS, html, keywords, seo, web design