June 16, 2011
Q: What is website keyword optimization?
A: Organizing your website in an easy to use, organized, and categorized by keyword manner.
Q: How do I know what keywords to use?
A: This would be an entire post of it’s own, but I will share some quick tips.
1. Think about what you would likely search, if you were the customer or user.
2. Add relevant elements of location (…in Utah), price (…under $1000), quality (top… or best…), and features (environmentally friendly…).
3. Ask other people what they would search.
4. Use SEO Tools to help you, here are a few of my favorite:
SEMRush – Helps you discover keywords based on your competitors’ rankings.
Google Keyword Tool – Great for generating a large list of keyword ideas. You will also be able to see monthly search volume data.
Q: What are some tips for making my content easier to use?
A: Make it easy for visitors to locate the page or content they are trying to find. In other words, don’t bury links to important content deep within your website. In most cases, you should be able to get to all the important pages on your website within 2 clicks from the homepage. Don’t make search engines, or people for that matter, travel down 3 links just to find the link, that points to the important content. Lastly, ask others that don’t know your website, to try and find a specific page within your website. Improve your website based on their feedback.
Q: What are some tips to be more organized and categorized?
A: Think of a search engine as a library and your website’s pages as books. For each page, examine your page title, page url, and anchor text in the links that point to that page, and make sure you’ve named these three elements something that could be categorized by type (or keyword). Ask yourself, “if I were the librarian, based on what’s been chosen for the page title, url, and link anchor text, would I be able to categorize this book?” (Hint) – If you’ve chosen Products (as the anchor text link), Product Page (as the title for the page), and products.html (as the url) you’re being too general and you’re making things hard for the search engine (library) to organize. It would quickly become difficult to manage the library, as “products” could be anything from “shoes” to “homes.” Make it easy for the search engine to categorize your page. Also, don’t just throw all your website assets into single folders. For example, if you have a 100 pdf files on your site, don’t just throw them all into a single pdf folder. Try to organize them into a few different categories within that main pdf folder.
Next, make sure the content on your page matches what you’ve chosen for the links, titles, and urls for that page. Don’t rush the page creation process, think about each page. Think about who you are trying to reach with the content on each page. Think about what the end user might likely search in relation to your content. Incorporate that likely search phrase into the page content or maybe even the url, title, and anchor text depending on the situation. Don’t use a phrase in the title, and then completely abandon that phrase in the content. Make sure your content repeats the title or parts of the title at least once, twice, okay maybe three times.
Q: What about links?
A: You’ll also want to work on a strategy to build good links back to your website. I won’t be covering that with this post.
Here are some SEO results based purely on website keyword optimization.:
(not that I’m going to ignore off-site links and other SEO tasks, but I usually start with improving user experience and organizing content)
(click on the image to see the rankings)
(click on the image to see the rankings)
Summary
Taking the time to think about how best to organize content pays off. Don’t rush the process of creating pages, titles, urls, anchor text, or content.
Visit our SEO page to learn about our search engine optimization programs. If you want to follow my posts or ask me a question, twitter is a good place: @redoliveryan.
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