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4 Areas of SEO Content Optimization that You Don’t Want to Miss!

Last post we discussed keyword research. Now that you have your keyword list and have tested them for effectiveness, now you are ready for step 3 of improving your website’s SEO.

3. Implement Content Optimization and Submission

Perhaps the most important aspect of improving your site’s SEO, content optimization and submission can also be quite time consuming and somewhat frustrating. There are 4 primary parts of optimizing your website for SEO (This list of 4 is certainly not exhaustive, but they are the key ones to focus on):

using keywords in your title tags
using keywords in the H1 tag
using keywords throughout the body copy
using keyword phrases as anchor text of links on other sites that point back to your website’s pages

Keywords in Title Tags

Title tags should tell both users and the search engine what a page is about. You will want to have a well written title that is both brief and descriptive for each page of your website so that they show up in the search results of search engines and can increase clicks from targeted searchers. Do not write title tags that have vague titles like "homepage" or "page 3." Titles that are stuffed with keywords and are longer than 60 characters will look spammy and also won’t help, so keep it concise 😉

Keywords in H1 Tags

Using keywords in your heading tags is also very important. There are six sizes of heading tags (H1 to H6) and they work as clues for readers to know what information is to follow. These assorted title tags should be used sparingly, generally no more than one H1 tag to a page. Also, be sure that the H1 tag represents the thesis of the page and is as close to the main targeted phrase as possible. Title tag faux pas are inconsistency in tag size, putting all the information in a title and using heading tags for styling text rather than content structure.

Keywords in Content

As you write the content for each of your site’s pages, it is important to incorporate your keywords throughout the body copy. You should use bold and italics whenever possible, without being overdone, as well as have a list (numbers, bullets, check boxes, etc.) that includes your keywords. Keep in mind that according to Jon Wuebbon, author of Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web, key phrase use should make up 3-8% of an article or page, but at the same time, don’t get too concerned with the numbers when it comes to keyword density. Just make sure you are aware of the key phrases you are going after and that your text reads logically and doesn’t sound like you are stuffing in as many key phrases as you can. As you create your web page content, be sure that it is easy to read, has a unique approach, focuses on the subject, showcases your services or products and is written with people, not search engines in mind. You should not have duplicated material – even if it is original work – on your site. In addition, your webpage(s) should not have poorly written material with grammatical errors, extensive misspellings (intentional misspellings not withstanding) or excessive amounts of writing on a wide range of topics without using paragraphs, headings or subheadings.

Keywords in Anchor Text

Using keywords and phrases as anchor text on other sites is a great way to direct people to your webpage. Submit articles that contain anchor text links back to your site on sites such as Ezinearticles.com, Buzzle.com, Ehow.com and others. Be sure the text is descriptive yet short and is easily spotted. When using anchor text, do not use long text (e.g. whole sentences), overloaded keyword articles, unneeded links that detract from a site’s usefulness or use generic terms like "page" or "click here".

Once you have implemented content optimization and submission as part of improving your site’s SEO, you are nearly "finished." As you will find in step four, found in our next post, there is no such thing as being completely finished with SEO, but knowing the steps to bettering your site’s SEO is one of the best things you can do to increase business.

Critical SEO Tips for Keyword Research

When building or redesigning your website, it is vital to do everything possible to make it rank high in a web search. After all, a website that is only visited by friends and family is not helping you increase your customer base. To help your site rank high in web searches, one of the most efficient methods is the effective use of SEO.

Coined in 1997, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of making one’s website more accessible and visible to search engines via natural or unpaid (aka- organic or algorithmic) search results rather than through SEM (search engine marketing) which is paid inclusion. When SEO is correctly employed, search engines will crawl your site and find relevance to a search term and the site will rank high at the top of search engine results. The higher your website ranks, the greater potential for business. It should be noted that writing for SEO should be done with social media groups such as Twitter, Facebook and others in mind as Google announced in December 2009 that it would be using the web histories of all its users to populate search results.

SEO is, however, more than stuffing your website with keywords. Paradoxically, too frequently using a keyword or phrase can work against you. To improve your website’s SEO, take these 4 steps (Steps 3 & 4 will be covered in subsequent articles).

Develop a list of keywords used to search for your webpage, products or services. As you begin creating a keyword list, be thorough but be sure not to only include your brand or company names. You may want to talk to friends and family for keyword ideas. Other ways to develop a keyword list is the use of synonyms (mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, etc.). Also, keywords don’t have to be single words; phrases with 3 or more words are known as long tail words or niche words and can bring more search engine hits than individual words.
Keyword Research and Development- After creating a list of keywords, you are ready to begin keyword research and development through the use of keyword research tools. You can use sites like Word Tracker, Google AdWords, Spy Fu and SEO Digger. These tools range in cost from free to a monthly or annual charge, but are well worth the time (and money) it takes to use them. The keyword research and development tools will show you the most popular search terms for your product or service and how often they are used. With these words and phrases identified you are ready to begin making changes to your website.

It is also critical to look at web analytics such as Click Tracks, Key Word Discovery or Keyword Spy. Web analytics will show you how many times related words are used to find specific information.

Once you have your keyword research finished you will be ready to proceed to step 3…covered next post 🙂

3 Great Ways to Analyze Incoming Links to Your Site for SEO

One critical element of planning for a link building campaign or to do some competitive analysis is to find out how many incoming links you have to your (or a competitor’s) website and what those links are. There are a ton of great resources out there that help you do this. Here are three free ones that we have found to be very useful.

Top 3 SEO Tags that You Must Use to Rank

I often get asked questions like "If I only could do one thing on my
site to make it be better optimized for search engines, what would it
be?" Well, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is the 3 most
important tags that you need to address on your pages in order to be
properly indexed by search engines…

1) The Title Tag

The title tag is the text that appears at the VERY top of a search window and it’s used when a page is bookmarked.

Since the title tag is not on the web page itself and many people pay it no attention this is a great place to use keywords that may look strange elsewhere. However, resist the urge to stuff too many key phrases in here. The more you use, the less weight they have, and you run the risk of looking spammy to Google, so choose wisely! Use our SEO Meta Tag Tool to make sure you don’t go overboard. Make sure that EVERY page on your website has a unique page title.

2) Header Tags

Header tags, similar to title tags, are what tell search engines what that page is about. The header tag that holds the most weight in a search engine’s eyes is H1 and there should only be one of them per page. There can be multiple H2, H3, H4, etc. tags per page, however. It is important that you really use the header tags and not just a font, div or span tag with a CSS class telling it to be big and bold. Search engines don’t look at CSS, so identifying a title as such in the code to search engines is critical. You can always use the H1 tag to style with CSS anyway. Again, every page should have a unique H1 tag.Here is what a header tag looks like when you view the page source in your browser:

3) Meta Description

The Meta description tag is completely hidden from people visiting your site, and it actually does not help your page rank any higher in search engines at all. So why is it number three in the list? While the meta tag doesn’t help a page appear in search engine results, it does determine WHAT shows up in search engine results. So put things in your meta description tag that would make someone want to click on your listing over your competitor right next to you. This is NOT the place to load up on key phrases and limit yourself to around one good sentence. Notice it will also show your title tag here as well.

There you have it, my top three tags for effective search engine optimization. Enjoy

Free SEO Title and Meta Tag Tool SEOMetaTagTool.com

We just launched a new free tool for those who want to make the most of their title, meta description and meta keyword tags on their website.

Click here to check out our SEO Title and Meta Tag Tool – SEOMetaTagTool.com.

As you may know, there is a certain number of characters you should optimally shoot for for each of these fields, and yes, we know that the meta keyword tag is virtually useless for SEO anymore, but we felt it was best to include that while we were at it

Just put in your information, keeping an eye on the counter to stay out of the red, and when you’re done hit the "Generate Code" button and get the HTML to put into your site. It’s that easy. Check it out!

2 Ways to Find Out if Links to Your Site Carry Value

There are two things to look for to see if a link TO your website from another website is sending you Pagerank value to boost your position in search engines. Both methods keep search engines from following that link. However, keep in mind that even though a link may not pass Pagerank, no link is a bad one (unless maybe it’s a link from an unscruptulus source), as it can still still drive a live person to your site. Most social media sites use one of these two methods, so they do not provide true links back to your site which improves your ranking in search engines (Links back to your site improve your ranking in search engines – Read more here), BUT there is still value because people can see the link and if they like what they see when they visit, they may elect to manually link to your site themselves or socially bookmark it which shares it with their friends and increases your exposure.

NoFollow – View the source of the website you are on. If you use a
web browser that allows "View Selection Source", like Firefox, that
makes this easier. If you use Firefox, highlight the link back to your
site and right-click and select "View Selection Source." You’ll see
some HTML code, but you want to look for something that looks like:

rel="nofollow"

This tag tells search engines to not follow that link, although people can still click on it.
Redirects – Many sites will use redirects to avoid passing Pagerank
to your link. You can identify that by turning on the "Status" bar at
the bottom of your browser if not already on (Look in menu "View –>
Status Bar") and then hover your mouse over the link on the page
without clicking on it, look in that bottom status bar to see where the
link points to. If the site is redirecting, you’ll see something like:

socialmediasite.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eyoursite%2Ecom

What this effectively does is links to themselves with a parameter
telling their site to then forward to your site. Again, search engines
will not see the redirect to you and instead just sees a link to the
site linking to you.

5 Ways to Market Your Site Using Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a relatively new concept that allows people who visit a website to share information that they find with their friends or associates that they are connected to in a variety of social websites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious and more.

This post will cover 5 ways that you can get more traffic to your website using social bookmarking as well as bleed over into link building in general as the two are closely related.

1) Make it easy to share. Make sure every page on your site that you want to get links to has an easy way for people to share it with others – news articles, pages, ecommerce products, etc. There are a number of tools out there, such as Sharethis.com that will give you a snippet of code that you can easily drop in to any page on your site. Also, many content management systems have this feature built in.

2) Share your own articles. Once you write a killer article or press release, share it with your group of contacts in the social media sites that you participate in. Don’t be afraid to endorse your new article on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

3) Bookmark other sites. Use a service such as Delicious to develop your own directory of useful links. Other people who trust your opinion will see what other sites you’ve found to be interesting. This also works with link promotion sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati (if it’s a blog post) and many, many other sites.

4) Comment on other people’s bookmarks. If other people are alredy drawing traffic from a great link, post a comment if you can to get your branding associated with that person’s success as well. This is great for blogs in particular. Comment on other people’s posts (but keep it pleasant!)and offer additional thoughts or just some encouragement.

5) Ask people for links. If you know that your article or post would be particularly of interest to another website community, trade organization, etc., ask them if they would mind linking to your article. In fact, use our free link-building tool to make sure you get the best formatting for that link. If it is truly a good article or post, there’s a good chance you’ll get good links to it.

These are just a few tips to demonstrate how you can leverage social bookmarks to better promote your site. Stay tuned for more tips!

Page Progressive Now Offers Internet Marketing Writing

Page Progressive is now offering article and press release writing specifically geared towards drawing more traffic to your website. This is accomplished by writing interesting articles and press releases that include key search phrases that you want to build an association with your website and then syndicating that content on the internet in order to get as many incoming links as possible to your site.

“Well-written press releases and articles are one of the best ways to build quality links to your website,” says Daniel Trimpey, CEO of Page Progressive.

This new service adds to the list of several services available for small businesses in Raleigh, NC who want to use internet marketing to acheive better exposure for their company.

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For more details, you can contact Page Progressive online here or call at 919-374-3014.

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