As discussed in last week’s article, there are two kinds of keywords: niche and article keywords.  This week, I’m going to discuss where and how to place keywords that are centered on articles, content, long tail, specific categories and more.  I’m calling these “article keywords.”

Here is a list of where and how to use these article keywords on your blog posts.Post or page title.

• Post or page title.
  Every page and post you create has a title, naturally, but it’s a good idea to make sure your that your blog theme or template places that title within a “Heading 1″ tag.  To find out, simply highlight the text and option-click  (Mac) or control-click (PC) to “view selection source”.  If you see “<h1>” around your title, then you are good.  If not, you’ll want to change themes or talk with your web designer to fix this.  Heading tags are prioritized by search engines over regular paragraph or div tags, and they go in order, with “H1″ being the top considered tag, “H2″ as second priority, and so on, down through “H6.”
  

  Page title on page and in “view source” code

• Blog post.
  Use your article’s keywords throughout your blog post, but make sure it doesn’t sound repetitive or overly obvious what the keyword phrase is.  You may want to read it to yourself a few times.  Because search engines don’t recognize punctuation, you can use tricks to break up the words like so:

  “It’s easy to be gluten-free. Moms are asking how.”

• Subtitles within your content.
  Not only is this a great place to use keywords, it makes your article more user-friendly to readers when long posts are organized into subtitles.  Best bet is to use the Heading 2 tag.
• Permalinks.
  If you are setting up your blog and have not put up any posts or pages yet, you’ll want to set your permalinks to have the page title and possibly date or category.  If you have them set up already with page titles, you can use plugins that will allow you to alter the permalink to remove extraneous words (like “the”, adverbs, etc.) and more succinctly match your keyword phrase.

  WARNING: Do not change your permalinks if you have any content up already, because visitors who’ve bookmarked your pages will lose their links and you could be hurt in search engines.  Always hire a professional to do this, or if you’re web savvy, back up and have the right plugins.   I’ll be doing a post on this in the near future.

  

  Permalink setting page in WordPress

• Tags.
  Because these are best suited to rare posts, highly targeted content, and long tail, this is a great place to use article keywords.
• Alternate text tags and names of images.
  It’s important that your images are named what they are.  Not only is it considered ethical, but it’s rude to put a  misleading alt tag for your visually disabled readers.   If you can find images that are relevant to your article and keywords, then by all means do so.  You have some leeway: a picture of an woman yelling could be easily named “angry mom.”
  

  Setting your alt text and image name in WordPress

You can also use them on your site’s pages in these areas:

• Menu link.
  Just like I mentioned last week, in about my page entitled “Mosaic Down Syndrome,” these are perfect places for  keywords.
• Page title tag, using an SEO plugin.
  There are plugins that will allow you to alter, edit and change the title tag of a page by overriding the default.  SEO Ultimate, Yoast, and All-in-One SEO are some of the more popular SEO WordPress plugins that allow you to do this.

Both Bing and Google admitted in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social signals, such as tweets, Facebook Likes, and +1s.