One of the most common forms of getting your business noticed online is through Search Engine Optimization. This is the program where you don’t spend any money buying ads or strategic placements, but essentially choose to optimize your content to have the search engines believe that your company is the authority on certain keywords. It might seem easy of a concept, but realistically it’s something that companies may sometimes get wrong. Sage Lewis of ClickZ believes that there’s more and more interest in this topic, but for the most part, websites are not implementing the most basic techniques.
Lewis believes that there are three basic steps that companies can take to do SEO right. If done, it is “highly likely that you’ll see a marked improvement in your search results.”
#1: Use Your Key Phrase in Your Title
Lewis says this is the most important thing that companies can do. Through the use of tools like Google’s Keyword Tool or WordStream Free Keyword Tool, you’ll be able to find phrases that you’d like to target. Afterwards, go ahead and create a page for each of the keywords – each one has their own keyword and should also have their own unique title. Perhaps most important of this step is to use the phrase exactly how you want it to.
As an example, Lewis uses a craft keyword:
…let’s pretend we’re optimizing a site that sells craft supplies. The three primary key phrases we’ll target are: “art craft supplies,” “kid craft supplies,” and “paper craft supplies.”
Our imaginary site happens to have pages for each of these three topics. So, three possible titles for each of these pages could be:
- “Huge Selection of Art Craft Supplies at ABC Crafts”
- “ABC Crafts – Really Fun and Unique Kid Craft Supplies“
- “Extensive Paper Craft Supplies at ABC Crafts”
So after choosing the keyword, Lewis suggests that you don’t modify the keyword in the content in any way. If it says “supplies”, then you need to have it read “supplies”, NOT “supply”. Doing it another way would result in less improvement in your SEO efforts. You have more success by using the keyword and/or keyword phrases exactly how you target.
#2: Use the Target Key Phrase in the Body Copy
Just like you would in your title, you need to make sure that your keyword phrases are also included in the body copy of your website. Whether you’re trying to optimize a landing page or the company’s main website, including those keywords is mandatory.
However, what can hurt your SEO efforts is the following: don’t put your keyword phrases in the image ALT or comment tags – it won’t be that remarkable. And never try and hide your content from both the user or the search engines (e.g. tiny text at the bottom of the page and/or making it the same color of the background so the user doesn’t see it). These types of “tricks” are known as blackhat SEO and can get you into serious trouble with the search engines.
#3: Cross Link Your Pages Using the Target Key Phrases
According to Lewis, cross linking your pages with the text of the hyperlink referencing the page will help significantly raise the importance of that page. It makes sense that instead of referencing a link by the words “click here”, you should be more specific and use the targeted keyword phrase. So if I was interested in using the target keyword phrase of “SEO tips”, what might help is when I link out to a reference site that might talk about SEO tips (see the hyperlink?).
You can read Sage Lewis’ blog post on ClickZ for more information on the SEO best practices listed above.
Source: Sage Lewis/ClickZ
Photo Credit: svilen001
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