Ranking well in the search engines is not going to happen by accident. With thousands of new sites coming online every single day, you HAVE to be proactive if you want your site to perform well in organic search results over time.
Here are six things you can do immediately to get the best results:
1.) Invest the time in keyword research – or hire someone (ahem, raising hand in back of the class) to do it for you. Believe me, its time and/or money well spent. This step will make the rest of your search engine optimization efforts so much easier because it will give you a clear idea of where you want to go.
2.) Incorporate your targeted keywords or phrases into your page names (or article titles). If you are launching (or relaunching) a new site, by all means select a domain name that includes your most important keywords. Don’t forget to add your keywords or phrases to your title tags, as well.
3.) You will want to use headings and subheadings throughout your copy for a number of reasons. For one, headlines (and subheadlines) are meant to grab your readers’ attention and pull them into your copy. They also help break up large bodies of copy and make skimming the contents easier on both human visitors and search engine spiders. So, it makes sense to include your keywords and phrases here, too.
4.) Optimize your alternate text (or Alt Text). All this means is if you have any photos or images on your site, you will want to take the extra step of adding appropriate “alt tags” to them. Search engine spiders can’t “see” images, so this copy allows them to “read” what the image is. I just realized I had forgotten to add them to the image on my “Rates” page. The image is of a message in a bottle – my thinking when I added it was “oh, I know.. let WebCopyResults.com get your message out”… what spiders “saw” instead was… “message in a bottle” (the text that came with the image)… CONFUSING and inconsistent with what I was trying to convey.
5.) Of course, all this talk about optimizing your site has to flow through to the actual page content. One word of caution, though, is don’t go crazy. Remember, your content is PRIMARILY meant to appeal to and benefit human visitors. Keyword ‘stuffing’ is frowned upon by search engines and is annoying to human visitors. Most sources recommend using a 1 – 3% keyword density, meaning if you have a 500 word page, your keywords should appear anywhere from 5 – 15 times. Personally, I think 3% is too high, so I normally shoot for 1 to 1.5%.
6.) Add a site map. This will quickly and easily allow both spiders and readers to see what your site has to offer.
