Distribution of Keywords

Keyword distribution

Keyword distribution is the process of assigning keywords to specific pages on your website. This is an important step in the content creation process, and results in the content on a page being aligned and relevant to the keyword that you're targeting on that page. You can't have an optimized page unless you know what keyword you're optimizing it for. Once you've identified all your target keywords through the Keyword Research process, we found that working in Microsoft Excel, or another spreadsheet program, allows you to create this mapping of keywords to the pages in your site structure in an organized way.

And it has the added benefit of keeping a record of which pages are targeting which keywords to refer back to in the future. You will need to list all the current pages of your website. Keep in mind that for many of your target keywords, you won't yet have a page and you'll need to create one. By using a spreadsheet you can easily see where in your site's architecture you'll want to put it and define some key pieces of information about it before you even start writing.

Keyword Distribution Spreadsheets

Your page targets should be 65 characters for a title and 156 characters for a description. These guidelines will help you avoid search engines truncating this information on the search engine results page. You can populate the spreadsheet with your existing web pages. Be sure to include every page of your site, including your Homepage, About page, Location page, Contact page, and other general kinds of content pages. Remember, search engines want to see unique information for each and every page.

Now take a look at the keywords from your keyword list and find the most appropriate pages of your site for each of the keywords. You should make sure to distribute one to two key phrase per page and try not to force anything.  Search engines prefer unique and relevant content. So if you have a keyword that doesn't match any page of your site, you'll want to create a new page. When you add a new page  you have a blank canvas to define the SEO-friendly URL, title, description, and header.

Writing content when you know the keyword you're optimizing it for upfront allows you to really dial-in on all of the best practices of content writing for keywords that you need to cover. The meat of each page is the body copy, and you'll probably need to go back through your existing pages to make sure that they're really optimized for the keyword you've defined as a target.

Using a keyword distribution spreadsheet will help you in a number of different ways. First, it gives you one place to organize and document the content of your site that will support the keywords that you're targeting. Second, it serves as an excellent resource for your copywriters and will help streamline workflows across all the different members of your website production team.

Treating this as a living document will ensure that you can quickly adapt to the changing nature of the search landscape and keep your content strategy on track month after month and year after year.

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330