Identify Your Key Phrase
Finding one or two key phrases to target in a page or a post on your website is never a bad idea. Write down that key phrase (or key phrases) to keep as a reminder as you write your content. If you are looking for a tool to help you find popular key phrases, wordtracker.com is a good place to start.
Page / Post Title
This is the first thing the search engines use to determine if your content is relevant to a user’s search. In WordPress this is populated in the Title field, found at the top of your content editor screen. As mentioned in the Blog Posts guide, you should keep your page title active and descriptive. Always use natural language. However, if your primary purpose is to capture organic search results, start the Title with the key phrase you want to target.
Secondary Headings (H2)
Most substantial pages and posts have more than one paragraph, and often times their content is broken down into sections with the help of secondary headings, or H2 headings. This not only makes your content easier for the human eye to scan for relevance, but search engines also look for secondary headings to ensure the content of a page is relevant to the title and the description (found in the excerpt). Like the page or post title, your content is more likely to rank high in the search results if you start at least one of your secondary headings with the keyword or key phrase.
The First Paragraph
A lesser known trick for ranking well in the search results is to use your keyword or key phrase in the first paragraph of your primary content. Unlike the secondary heading or the title, you don’t have to use it at the very beginning. Just try your best to fit it into the paragraph using natural language. Again, don’t force this opportunity. If it doesn’t happen naturally, then it doesn’t happen. The use of the keyword or key phrase in the first paragraph is not a hard rule for ranking higher in the search results.
Description (Excerpt)
Every post and page on your site should include a field toward the bottom of your editor called “Excerpt.” This excerpt serves as a summary for the content of the post or page that you are publishing. This excerpt will be found on various parts of the site, especially in dynamic sections where your posts or pages are fed into the content automatically from a feed. The excerpt is also the first 156 characters of any given search result in Google. Knowing that Google only publishes descriptions up to 156 characters in length (including spaces), you should craft your excerpt to fit this number of characters.
Supplementary Key Phrase
It’s always a good idea to pick a supplementary key phrase to include in your vocabulary as you develop the content in your post/page. This supplementary key phrase should be related in some way to the primary key phrase, but they don’t have to share a word. The search engines have gotten smart enough to know that certain words and ideas are related to each other, so if you see an opportunity to piggyback some extra search results on top of your primary key phrase, take it. All of the recommendations above will apply to the supplementary key phrase, with the exception of using it in the page or post title.