dangletech

My last few postings have focused on paid search and how landing page best practices can help improve conversions. So I thought this week I ‘d change it up and take a look at some basic best practices for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), specifically:
1.  Identifying the right keywords
2.  Optimizing your content correctly
3.  Paying attention to keyword density

Optimizing a website to improve search engine rankings actually involves two key activities:
1.  Embedding appropriate search terms in your website content, so that Google sees the association of your content with those terms, and includes you in the organic results it returns.
2.  Developing as many (appropriate) inbound links to your website as possible, so that Google views you as being highly relevant for a given subject.

I’m going to focus on keywords this week. I’ll cover off link-building in a separate posting sometime in the near future.

Selecting the Right Keywords
To effectively optimize your website you must first establish which keywords and keyword phrases are most relevant to your business.

If you haven’t already done so, the best way to achieve this is to kick off a paid search campaign, coupled with an intelligent landing page program, to see which keyword phrases perform best.  This will yields three key benefits:
1.  You can track actual conversions vs. simple clicks, which is a much better measure of keyword value.
2.  You get empirical evidence of what real people are actually searching for, vs. making educated guesses about which keywords to optimize against.
3.  You’ll generate real inbound leads en route that you can hand off to your sales team.

Optimizing Your Content Correctly
Once you’ve generated a list of priority keywords, you should optimize one or maximum two keywords/ keyword phrases on each page of your website.  First and foremost you must ensure that these keywords are included in your headings (H) tags, as Google pays a lot of attention to page headings, and reflects this in your search rankings. To do this, make sure your site pages are coded in such a way that main page headlines are H1 tags and subheads are H2 or H3 tags, and incorporate your keywords appropriately. You should also incorporate keywords into your main body content and you can also add them to alt and comment tags - but don’t overdo it. Google will penalize you if you have too many keywords in a page, and this will be reflected in a lower page ranking.

Keyword Density
Research indicates that keyword density on any given web page should ideally be 3% to 5% of the total text on the page.  So calculate the keyword density on each of your key pages to ensure you don’t exceed these optimal levels.

To calculate keyword density, don’t just focus on the page content that you can see. Google doesn’t differentiate between page content or meta content, so you shouldn’t either.  When you’re calculating your overall word and keyword counts, be sure to include Title tags, Description tags and Alt tags. It’s widely agreed that Google no longer pays attention to Meta keywords, but Yahoo does, so include these in your counts too.

Of course, there are many other things you can do to maximize the success of your website optimization program, but these three items are so fundamental, you should really place them at the top of your task list.

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Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads -www.funnelbuilders.com