As a business owner, you want your website to perform for you, but time is at a premium and you can’t spend all day working on your website. Ranking high for your keywords can take a lot of effort depending on the competition, but the chances are you’ll want to outsource it to make better use of your time. Whether you are self-optimizing, or hire it out, make sure you implement these key techniques to guarantee your success.
1. Fill your ‘title’ tag with your keywords. Highlight the keywords and phrases that the page is featuring by creating a unique title. When your potential visitors search that keyword, it’s your site title that will display dominantly on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), so make it worthwhile.
2. Put your keywords in the anchor text of your inbound links. When a website links to you, the words or text that is underlined is what really matters to the Search Engine Spiders. For the links to your website that you can control, change them to your keywords/phrases and surround them with descriptive text. For example, your friend’s blog might have a link to your site, it might say: “visit out John’s website.” Ask him to put “car dealership” or “Ford service center” as the link (or whatever your potential customers are searching for), or at least “John’s American Cars” (your business name).
3. Update your Site Often with Unique and Relevant Content. Search engines love fresh content. If you update your site frequently by adding fresh content, Google will begin crawling your site more often, which makes sure your recent changes are indexed sooner. The best way to do this is by featuring a blog or articles section on your website, which you can contribute to a few times per week. This also sets you up as an expert in your field.
4. Build your Filenames Using Keywords. Many times, designers will use shorthand to name the files that comprise your website. This saves a bit of time by cutting down on keystrokes and possible typos, but at the expense of some free SEO. By naming the document ‘auto-detailing-service-seattle.html’ instead of ‘d-sea.html,’ you are able to include your keyword in one more important place.
5. Build an XML Sitemap. By giving the search engines a nicely formatted list of all the pages in your site, they are much more inclined to crawl and index them all, making your life better in the process. To create this sitemap, you need to follow a special format which can be daunting if you’re not used to coding. You can find the syntax here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html. Just save the new document as ‘sitemap.xml’ and save it in the root of your website directory.
6. Build a Large Number of Backlinks. There are entire companies that do nothing but provide backlink generation services, which should tell you how important this process is. Simply put, search engines favor sites that are referenced by other well-referenced sites (the basis of Google’s PageRank). There are countless ways to get backlinks, but arguably the best way is to use the content you generated in Step 3. Submit your articles to directories and content libraries using special programs or manual submissions. You can even delegate this a knowledgeable employee (or one that knows how to use Google) for their downtime. Additionally, search engines favor links from .gov and .edu domains, so use your connections if you have them!
7. Saturate Your Page with Your Keyword Phrase. Each page of content should be focused around one (at most, 3) keyword phrases which consist of about 3% of your total text. This is called a keyword-to-content ratio. By naturally slipping your keyword into the content often, you bring up the page’s relevency on that topic. Don’t go much over 5% though, or the search engines could interpret it as spam.
8. Build your Headings Using your Keywords. After the title, the most important areas on your page for the search engine spiders are between your ‘h1′, ‘h2′, and ‘strong’ tags. Always capitalize on the opportunity to include your keywords and phrases in these areas. Don’t neglect them because they are ‘implied’ – that doesn’t help your SEO efforts.
Following these principles will help you get that much closer to the coveted #1 spot for your keyword..
