Good content is very important to succeed in your motives of writing it. But sadly it’s not us who decides how good your content is and at what relevant position should it appear when people are searching for you. This calls for making your content appear good to the search engines to. Some tips to optimize your content for SEs, without compromising on readability.
Optimize content for SEs
No doubt you have written some good content that describes your products and services brilliantly but a few more steps can help you make your content liked by search engines too. Content is important for your landing pages. It should be effective to impress your visitors and also optimized to be ranked high in search results. Following are some guidelines to optimize your strategize it with keywords to let search engines notice it worthy.
Choose what your target phrases and keywords are… and do this wisely. Prepare a list. Check your web traffic history, check with your customers, investigate what a probable customer have in mind while looking for your product.
Perhaps the most important — and inexpensive — Rank high for your preferred keywords on the main search engines in “organic” or “natural” searches (as opposed to paid ads). Search engines send robot “spiders” to index the content of your webpage, so let’s begin with steps to prepare your WebPages for optimal indexing. Idea is to give clues to SEs what your content is about. This is SE optimization.
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Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title
This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format: <TITLE>Promoting brands aggressively | Building identities online – Arbunize</TITLE>.
- 5-8 word title tag. Include keywords
- No articles: “A”, “An”, “The”.
- No filler words: “and”, “such as”, etc.
- No poison words: “Click here”, “Check out”, etc.
- Make it readable.
- Have generic and branded keywords included in 80-20 ratio
- The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title this is called “keyword prominence”
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Write a Keywords and Description META Tag
Meta data is “data about data”. The keywords and description provides an SE clue about what is the purpose of the page. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and key phrases on this page. Don’t include keywords that don’t appear on the webpage. Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format:
<meta name=”Keywords” content=” deciphering dreams, some lessons learnt from life, how to use intuition, how god works, articles on life, spiritual nature of human life, power of your mind, positive thoughts in life”>
<meta name=”Description” content=”Collection of articles and poems on various themes of life, dreams, success and relationships. Dedicated to thinkers who have a deeper insight of life”>
- Target 7-10 keywords / phrases for a page. ideally this should be 3 per page but if you are not sure add a couple more.
- Write a short description of page (summary)
- Check the keyword density of your keywords in the page content (number of times a keyword (or its synonym) occurred/total word count of page)
- Try to choose keywords that are placed at important positions. i.e.; heading tags, bold text, anchor text (hyperlinks), etc.
- Maximum number of characters in description tags should be about 255; just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed
- Every page in your site MUST have a distinct title, keywords and description tags. Better leave blank than to copy.
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Include Your Keywords in Headers (H1, H2, H3)
Search engines consider keywords that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags.
- Include important words in <Hx> tags
- Assign Hx tags while using <ol>, <ul>, etc
- Use bold and underline options to highlight content, even your font size shows prominence. So highlight your keywords if it suits your appearance as this will also look good to SEs
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Position Your Keywords in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text
SEs algorithms deem your first paragraph as the important as this is expected to provide introduction to page. Use good description with good keywords. Your keyword placement works better higher in the document with decreasing density and proximity towards bottom.
- Write an introduction to the content of the page
- Don’t just artificially stuff keywords
- SEs expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high. DON’T overdo!
- Place keywords a usual distance apart, don’t stuff them too close. evenly distribute your page weight.
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Include Descriptive Keywords in the ALT Attribute of Image Tags
With the image search bringing a lot of traffic to sites, it is important to optimize your images both for the page and the image itself. Who knows an image of your product can drive buyers
- This helps your site be more accessible to sight-impaired visitors
- Gives additional clues to the search engines
- ALT attributes do help get your images ranked higher for image search
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Use Keywords in Hyperlinks
When SEs see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important. To emphasize it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or keyphrase, such as Meaning of dreams –> DecipheringDreams.htm
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Develop WebPages Focused on your Target Keywords.
Develop several WebPages on your site, each of which is focused on a target keyword or keyphrase for which you would like a high ranking. Let’s say you sell “vision inspection” systems. Use Google Insights for Search or the free keyword suggestion tool on Wordtracker to find the related keywords people search on. In this case: write separate webpages featuring the keyword “Vision inspection”, “machine vision inspection”, “vision system inspection” ,”vision system” ,”vision inspection equipment” ,etc. Write completely different article on the topic it could be something on “erection and commissioning of vision inspection systems”, “troubleshooting vision inspection equipment” or like wise. You can’t fully optimize all the webpages in your site, but for each of these focused-content webpages, spend lots of time tweaking to improve its ranking.
