If you completed last month’s homework, send us a Tweet and we’ll send you a gold star (a verbal gold star).
Now that you have your words, the next step is to make effective use of them throughout your site. The end result is to have your content rank higher in search results when someone searches for one of these words. Here is where the three levers spoken of previously of content, technical, and links come into play.
Content
Incorporate your keywords into the content of your site. Take the bucket of words you put together for each section of your website, and make sure the words in that bucket appear in the content of this section.
If the page or article actually is about this keyword, it should be easy. If you find this difficult or unnatural, there may be a disconnect between your content and the keyword. Reconsider using the keywords that aren’t fitting. This serves as a helpful gut check to ensure the integrity of your content.
Technical
If you have access to the html on your website, do a thorough review of your heading tags, especially the h1 and h2 tags. Make sure one of your keywords for this page appear within the tag, but don’t stuff them, just one will do. This helps usability and orients your audience. When a user clicks a search result, they are expecting to see their search term prominently on the page.
Check the names of the files and images uploaded to your site. Can you incorporate your keywords into file names? Can you use a keyword in the caption of images on the page?
Ensure that the article can easily be found from the typical entry points of your website. The page should be accessible from no more than four clicks away from another page on the website. If it’s buried, see if there are ways to promote it on your homepage, or link to it from other articles within your website.
Links
Link to content outside of your website and ask others to link to you as well. Look for friends, even those outside your industry, to be allies on a particular topic and use each other as a resource to point your audience.
Link to content outside of your website and ask others to link to you as well.
Encourage bloggers and your socially connected fans to link to you from their websites, blogs, and social media accounts. Ensure your own social media profiles have a link to your website in the profile. Tweets, status updates, pins, and checkins all count. Make sure to return the favor – be a good Internet friend to those that link to you.
There is a delicate balance here. The content on your site is for the reader – a human. It needs to be clear and informative, while also keeping in mind that robots are looking at your site to put it in front of your human audience. Your reader should not be aware that you are battling against your competitors to get their attention.
Want to know the best ways to apply SEO to your site, send us an email, we’d love to help!
