This question usually comes from someone who has just finished keyword research and is looking at a list of terms with no idea where they physically go. It is a reasonable question with an unhelpful history — a decade of advice about density percentages and meta keyword fields has left a lot of people looking for a mechanical process that no longer exists. There is still a correct answer, and it is mostly about structure rather than insertion.
The Short Version
Your primary keyword goes in seven places, in roughly this order of importance:
- Title tag — near the front
- H1 — usually a close variant of the title
- First 100 words of the body
- URL slug — short and literal
- At least one H2
- Image alt text, where the image genuinely relates
- Meta description — for click-through, not ranking
Secondary keywords go wherever they read naturally, mostly in subheadings and supporting paragraphs. That is the whole placement guide.
The harder and more important part is what “naturally” means, and why the mechanical approach fails.
Where Each One Goes
Title Tag
The strongest on-page signal. Put the keyword near the front, keep the whole title to 50–60 characters, and give a reason to click. Covered in detail in how to write title tags.
H1
One per page. Usually similar to the title but written for someone already reading rather than someone deciding whether to click. It can be slightly longer and more conversational.
First 100 Words
Mention the topic early. This is partly a relevance signal and mostly good writing — a reader who cannot tell within two sentences whether they are in the right place will leave.
Do not force it into the opening sentence if it reads badly. Somewhere in the first paragraph is fine.
URL Slug
Short, lowercase, hyphen-separated, keyword present once. Set it correctly before publishing, because changing it later requires a redirect and costs equity. See what an SEO slug is.
Subheadings
Use H2s to structure the page around the subtopics a searcher expects. The keyword or a close variant should appear in at least one, but the real job of headings is coverage, not placement — if your H2s address the questions people actually have, the vocabulary follows automatically.
Image Alt Text
Describe the image accurately. If the keyword genuinely belongs in that description, include it. If it does not, do not force it — alt text exists for screen reader users first, and stuffing it is both unhelpful and a spam signal.
Meta Description
Include it once, naturally. It does not affect rankings, but Google bolds query terms in the snippet, which improves click-through. See meta descriptions.
What Does Not Work
The meta keywords tag. Dead since 2009. Google ignores it entirely and Bing may treat it as a spam signal. If your CMS has the field, leave it empty.
Keyword density targets. There is no correct percentage. The old 1–2% guidance is a relic of when repetition genuinely influenced rankings. Google’s language models now recognise synonyms and paraphrases, so repetition adds nothing and reads badly.
Hidden text. White text on white backgrounds, off-screen positioning, display: none blocks full of terms. This is a straightforward spam violation and easy for Google to detect — see white hat vs black hat SEO.
“LSI keyword” insertion. The concept does not describe how Google works. Cover related subtopics properly and the vocabulary appears on its own — explained in LSI keywords.
Footer keyword lists. Blocks of city names or service variations stuffed into the footer. Obvious, ineffective, and a doorway-page signal.
Cramming every keyword onto one page. Terms with different intents need different pages. Putting them together produces a page that ranks for none of them — the reasoning is in how many keywords to target per page.
The Part That Actually Matters
Placement is the easy half. The half that determines whether the page ranks is whether it covers the topic properly.
Google is assessing whether your page satisfies the query, not counting term occurrences. That means the productive work is:
- Reading the top-ranking pages and noting what subtopics they all cover
- Checking People Also Ask for the questions searchers have next
- Turning those into sections the page genuinely addresses
- Adding something the ranking pages lack — specific detail, original data, a worked example, a real opinion
A page structured around what a searcher actually needs will contain the relevant vocabulary without anyone placing it deliberately. A page structured around a keyword list will read like it was, and will underperform pages that were not.
A Practical Order of Operations
- Pick one primary keyword for the page, from your keyword analysis
- Check the SERP to confirm the page type that ranks — guide, comparison, service page
- List the subtopics the ranking pages cover, plus what they miss
- Outline your H2s around those subtopics
- Write the content to genuinely answer the question
- Then set the title, H1, slug, and meta description
- Review once for anywhere the keyword appears forced, and remove it
Step seven catches most problems. If a sentence exists only to hold a keyword, delete it.
How Much Is Too Much
Without a density target, people reasonably ask how to tell when they have overdone it. The test is not numeric:
- Read the page aloud. Repetition you would not say in conversation is repetition to cut.
- Check whether any sentence exists only to hold the term. Delete those.
- Ask whether a knowledgeable reader would find it natural. If it reads as written-for-search, it is over-optimised.
In practice, a well-written 1,500-word article naturally contains its primary keyword perhaps five to ten times, plus variations, without anyone counting. If you are having to work to include it more, the page probably does not need it.
Structure First, Placement Second
The honest summary: keyword placement is a twenty-minute job that follows a much larger job. Get the seven locations right and you have covered everything placement can do for you — which is real, but limited.
What decides rankings is whether the page is the best available answer to the query. That comes from research, structure, and genuine substance, none of which is about where terms sit in the HTML.
Do the structural work first. Then place the keyword in seven places, read it back, and move on.
If you want content built around proper research and structure rather than keyword insertion, our SEO services cover strategy through production. Our on-page SEO checklist is a good next read. Get in touch with the team at blogthememachine.com, and subscribe to our newsletter below for more guides like this one.
