Wednesday, September 7, 2011

How to Target My Keyword – and Get Ranked!

Posted by Unknown at 5:10 PM Labels: ONLINE MARKETING, SEO

Many users want to know how to get search engines to recognize specific keywords that they’d like associated with their website. The goal is to attract potential customers who don’t know you, through organic Google searches. Follow these steps to have your targeted keywords correctly inserted into your pages.

1. Make a List of Keywords

Stay organized and focused. Study your competition. Make a list of keywords that are relevant to your business. Start with the obvious ones. For example, if you were creating a website for Lisa’s pancake house you may write the generic word “pancakes” down first, then perhaps “best pancakes” and then you might get even more specific and choose a local keyword, such as “San Francisco pancakes” or “strawberry pancakes in San Francisco”.

You may be able to get indexed for each of these keywords, but the greater question is how well you can get ranked. Even if you get indexed in the 100^th page for pancakes, it probably benefit your business much.

Each keyword has different levels of competition which you can see by the number of results and by undertaking some research to find out how many people search for that keyword. Software is available to help such as WordTracker or Google AdWord .

Consider the size and amount of traffic you are likely to generate to your website. If you’re creating a 10-20 or even 50 page website, I don’t recommend trying to compete with the Apple website, for example.

2. Remember Content is King

This cliché survives because it holds a world of truth. Your website must contain quality, relevant content in order for its keywords to be caught. Writing the same key phrases over and over again will be recognized as spam by the search engines. If you’ve chosen good and relevant keywords you should have no problem inserting them into your text naturally and organically.

Insert your keywords throughout your text. Spread them out evenly and discretely without making it obvious.

Aim for your homepage to contain 400 words. A footer is a good place to add text if you prefer an image-based homepage. Aim for 250 words on all other pages. For the best results, you should aim for you keyword to appear about 3 times for every 250 words. This includes your titles, headers and regular text.

Google loves headers. More emphasis is placed on any text that appears in your headers, so make sure you word and phrase your headers wisely. In the Wix website editor, select the Text button from your menu, and choose Title. The text you write here is what will be interpreted as a header tag – it’s that simple. The larger your header text, the higher it will rank.

The more text you have, the more opportunity to insert a keyword. Having trouble finding room for more content? For Lisa’s Pancake House, an “About” page or a ‘Reviews’ page may be good places to add some content.

3. Use Your Meta-Tags

Search engines rely on 2 types of Meta tags to discern the subject of a web page or website.

These are both found in the Settings section of your Editor, in the SEO Settings box.

Title Tag: The most important part of your page, in terms of SEO. The title appears on the very top left-hand corner of your browser when you are viewing your Flash website. Make sure your title contains relevant keywords. Also note that keywords found at the beginning of a title are much stronger than those placed toward the end. Titles should not be longer than 70 characters, including spaces.

Description Tag: The description tag is another great opportunity to use your keywords. The description cannot be viewed from within the site, but it is the text that will appear alongside the link to your website in search results. This is an important text. Try to keep this text between 150-160 words. Use at least two of your keywords in the description. Keep it to the point, be direct and catchy.

You may also add up to 7 keyword tags in this same section of the Editor. Make sure you’re adding keywords or phrases that actually appear in your content.

Alt Texts: You can add “Alt Text” to your images that will be read by search engine crawlers, and cannot be seen by users. Take this opportunity to use the keyword you are promoting one more time. In the Wix editor, you can add Alt Texts to your gallery pictures through the Manage Photos option.

4. Internal Linking

Internal linking refers to the navigation within your website and the infrastructure of links pointing from one page to another within your Flash website. Since your homepage (or landing page) is usually the page that gets the most traffic and the most links pointing at it, it is usually the most important page in your website. Use text links to point at the different pages of your website to make sure that the search engine knows what that page is about.

For example, all links within Jack’s New York Pizzeria website pointing at the website’s homepage can use the ‘anchor text’ “Jack’s New York pizzeria” instead of the generic ‘Homepage’. An inner page in Jack’s website might deal exclusively with pepperoni pizzas, so the link to that page can use the anchor text “Jack’s pepperoni pizza”.

Pages with more links pointing at them will be considered as having more importance and relevancy from the point of view of the search engine crawler. The more often a link is used, the more relevancy and importance it is allocated.

5. External Linking

The same principles of internal linking are applied to links from the outside. Get as many backlinks to your site as possible and make sure your links are properly anchored in relevant text – keywords.

You can optimize specific pages for specific keywords by dedicating specific keywords to specific pages. For example, all links using the anchor text: “Jack’s anchovy pizza” to point at a page that has lots of text on the subject of anchovy pizza. Use all the links with the anchor text “Jack’s New York Pizzeria” to point at the home page that has that specific keyword inserted into it repeatedly.

Links will have greater potency when they come from a powerful website. Powerful websites are websites with a high page rank and a lot of traffic. A web page that simply has a long list of links from it (also known as a link farm) won’t have the same effect on your website as a link in a popular pizza review magazine, pointing at your website from an article raving about your great pizza.

Bottom line: the more anchor links pointing at your website – the better. Make sure these links are active.

From wix.com