How to Optimize Your Keyword Consistency

What is the difference between keyword density and keyword consistency? The former refers to the number of times a keyword appears in a particular piece of content, usually as a percentage of total words. The latter refers to when the keyword is used throughout the web page in the most important places.

The consistent use of keywords makes it easier for search engine bots to find them on your site, helping it rank higher in search results. These keywords indicate what category or topic your web page covers, which is important in search engine crawling and indexing. The bot also uses these keywords when deciding if a page is relevant to a search query.

Now that you know that keyword consistency is important in ranking high in search results, let's look at how to optimize keyword consistency on web page, to ensure that you are using your keywords in the best, most consistent manner.

How to Optimize Your Web Page for Keyword Consistency

Title tag

Every web page should have a unique title tag that includes the keyword. It is the meta title that appears in search engine results. It is also the first thing that your visitors get to see when they open your web page. It helps search engine bots to determine the relevance of your site for the keywords in search queries. Here is an image of Amazon's Advanced Review so you can see how the title tag works:

While you can technically use more than one keyword in your title tag, you're best using only one, or two if they are closely related, to avoid diluting relevance or looking unnatural (spammy). Titles should be concise as well, Google applies more weight to the first few words in a title, and truncates them in SERPs after about 65 characters.

When the visitor sees your website among search results, they will use the first few words to determine whether the website will be relevant to what they are looking for. If they think it is worth their time, they will go ahead and click on the site. In other words, using keywords in your meta title increases your CTR.

Meta description

The meta description is a short summary of the content on a web page. It usually appears in search results as well, to give users an idea about the information that the page contains.

If a user finds the meta description relevant to what they are looking for, they usually go ahead and click on your website.

Most of the times the meta description shows up in search results if it includes the keyword that a user used in the search query. Therefore, you need to include your keywords in your meta description. Just like in the meta title, keeping the main keyword near the beginning will help increase your click through rate.

While Google does not use meta descriptions as a ranking signal, they do use click through rates. This means that a good meta description that increases your CTR will also increase your likelihood of ranking higher in search results.

A good meta description should be:

• Unique
• Actionable
• Relevant to the page content
• 135 to 165 characters
• Include the main keyword
• Include a CTA (call to action) "“ this is the action that you want people to take, for instance, “buy now”, "learn more", and "click here"

Headings and subheadings

The text in a page's HTML header tags should contain the target keywords too. The headings, subheadings and meta title should all be slightly different, but should be very close. Do not copy and paste your page titles into headers.

Search engine bots crawl headers and subheads to determine a page's content, with the <h1> tag being the most important on the page. Include your main keyword in this tag and use one on every page.

Use <h2> through <h6> tags to add structure and flow to your content. Good user experience definitely reflects in your search results. If you use HTML5 on your site, you can have an <h1> tag for each article section.

When you run a review for your site with WooRank, our bots will crawl and analyze the keyword consistency on your page so you can get a better idea of what keywords your page is using consistently:

Image alt text

Add your keywords to the images on your site as well. If the user has a screen reader, slow internet connection or images turn off on their browser, the image alt text will appear instead.

Google will crawl image tags to read the alt text. Using your keywords here will help your images rank in Google image search, which can be a good source of traffic for your website.

As always, keep your text in a readable format. It is advisable to use the keywords that are most likely to resonate with your audience or that match their search queries in your image alt tags.

Page body text

Create in-depth content that covers a topic comprehensively. This way, you are able to not only use keywords throughout the content but to use latent semantic keywords (words that are topically related to other words). This way, your page's ties to a topic are strengthened, increasing your page's ranking.

Do not spin or copy content. Write it yourself (or hire a writer). Search engines will sometimes leave pages out of results entirely if they think they are copied. High-quality content allows your content to be evergreen, staying relevant for years.

File names

Ensure that all the files embedded on your site maintain keyword consistency by including keywords in the file names. In fact, use the keywords at the beginning of the file name. If you need to separate words, use hyphens instead of underscores, as in “SEO-research” instead of "SEO_research" or "SEOresearch". Keep the file name precise. The more words in a file name, the less impact the keywords have. Ensure it is possible to tell what the file contains.

If you embed a video or powerpoint presentation, post a text transcript or outline of your file in HTML.

Why are file names important? They give search engine bots content to crawl. They can't crawl PDFs, videos or images, they can still find keywords.

Keyword Consistency Helps Your Site Rank

Now that you understand this concept of keyword consistency, it is now time to optimize as discussed above. Use the website review from WooRank to determine your website's keyword consistency, and then activate your free trial to start optimizing.