Search engines LOVE good content. And what is good content? Good content is focused and organized text and images on your website. Website content that is focused uses a similar set of words in the page title, description, headings, and body text. The search engines are absolutely focused on getting the best understanding of all websites because they are able to return better search results for their users.
The more focused you make your website content, the more the search engines understand its unique topic, which allows them to send you search visitors who are actively seeking the information you make available on your website.
Before spending time optimizing your website’s content for the search engines, make sure you start with the best list of keywords. Keywords are one to five word long phrases. The best keywords:
- Describe your business and industry, ie: plumbing supplies
- Describe your service area if you only sell locally, ie: Albany NY plumbing supplies
- Describe the topics of content that your website contains, ie: do-it-yourself plumbing tips
- Describe what a prospective customer is thinking when they look for your products or services, ie: buy new toilet flush handle
- Have a high volume of monthly searches in the search engines
- Have a low volume of competing websites with similar content
Here are five tools and techniques that you can use to help determine what keywords you should select before building new website content or optimizing your existing content.
- First, make your own list of keywords that your potential customers might use when looking for your information, product, or service. Remember to include synonyms and well as common misspellings. Ask your customers how they think of your business.
- Use a search engine to search for these keywords to find your online competitors. Visit your competitors’ websites and take note of the keywords you see in their page titles and text headings.
- Use Compete.com to learn what keyword searches send the most traffic to your competitors’ websites. Use their Site Profile tool analyze a competitive website and look under the Search Analytics heading to see the top five keywords by volume.
- If you have a Web site with web analytics software, look for the list of keywords that have driven visitors from the search engines to your website in the past. Even better, if your web analytics software tracks conversions (ie: sales, lead form submissions, inquiries, etc), look for the list of keywords that have sent visitors who converted.
- Use Google’s Keyword Suggestion tool. It shows you how many monthly searches are conducted for your keywords and provides an estimated level of competition for each keyword.
Use these tools and techniques to determine a great list of keywords that will guide your strategy as you create and optimize new website content.
So now what? Once you have your list of keywords you can now use website optimization tools to optimize each page of your website for one to two relevant keywords. Optimize your website until you reach a high site wide optimization score.
A 60% site wide optimization score is good. Some sites reach a 75% optimization score or higher. Once you’ve reached a high site wide optimization score you’ll know that your website has the focus required to clearly communicate its unique topics to the search engines. In result, the search engines will reward you with more targeted visitors to your website.
