Content Writing Can Be Your Best SEO Technique
The internet is alive and buzzing buzz about SEO also known as Search Engine Optimization. Everyone agrees that using the right keywords on their website is important to get good search engine rankings. But, there are many opinions on exactly what constitutes the right keywords for a website or for that matter how to use keywords once you decide which ones are right for you.
There is a Chinese proverb that goes something like this, “Most people dream of accomplishing great things, but very few stay awake long enough to actually do them.”
A keyword is a term or phrase that describes the product, services or information offered on your website that people are most likely to type into a search engine to find that particular thing. Appropriate keywords include the basic topic, any related topics, the most common related phrases and even common misspellings of the keywords.
For example, let’s say you own a Italian restaurant and your specialty is calzone. Here are some reasonable keywords for your website.
restaurant (and its common misspelling restuarant)
restaurant “your city”
Italian restaurant
Italian restaurant “your city”
Calzone
Which are the best keywords to use for optimizing your site? You need to use a keyword tool like the free one at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion to see how many people actually typed in that keyword recently. The results I got were:
restaurant (6,635,285)
restaurant “your city” (typical large city 200,000 –700,000)
Italian restaurant (179,658)
Italian restaurant “your city” (typical large city 2,000-16,000)
Calzone (6,450)
Obviously, you want to optimize for restaurant, restaurant “your city” and Italian restaurant. But you should include all of these keywords as well as any other relevant keyword phrases in the keyword metatag on each of your web pages.
The best optimization method is to write keyword rich articles containing material relevant to the products, services, or information content and post them on your website. For example, let’s ay you sell pet supplies. Articles on any breed of dog, cat or other animal that you sell products for would be appropriate content for SEO keyword articles.
How It All Works
Search engines send programs called spyders (or crawlers) out on the internet to search for websites and index the site pages. These spyders will index each page and follow each link on your website unless they told not to follow the links. As they gather information about your website, they send it back to their parent search engine’s database. The spyders love fresh, new, relevant content and once they discover your site will periodically check back to see if there is new content because each search engine is trying to provide valuable relevant content to web surfers.
In addition to indexing your website, search engines use complex algorithms to determine the popularity and page rank of your site. There are many factors involved but keyword use and density are important factors.
The keyword density is the number of time a keyword is repeated on a page. Google likes approximately 2% density while MSN, Yahoo and the other search engines will tolerate up to 4%. More than that is considered keyword spamming and will hurt your search engine rankings.
The best results are obtained by optimizing one page for each keyword. The keyword should appear in the webpage title, the article title, the first paragraph in the article, in any anchor text that links to the article from other pages on your website and in the site map. It should also be mention occasionally in the body text of the article.
Do this correctly and you have taken the first step to getting good search engine rankings.