Overview:
The focus of this ONLINE STORE MARKETING 101 article is to help you write content for articles and blogs that is search engine optimized, with a focus on the fundamentals. It is not an attempt to teach you every last detail about SEO for content creation. It assumes you have researched your keywords well already.
Goals:
The point is to make a unique page on your site/blog for each of your most important keywords that have real value to someone that might read them—not just search engines; even if it’s not totally original and profound writing. If you can write cutting edge, compelling stuff, that’s even better as it will attract people to link to those articles.
Real people will find and read these, so don’t put out garbage since that helps no one. Of course, the more interesting it is, the more likely that a visitor will stay on your website when they find that page too.
This is not a rush job, but I would suggest making a commitment to write at least one article a week till you have a couple dozen of them to start out with. If you can, become the expert in your niche, force yourself to know more than anyone, and be a leader of valuable fresh content in your industry.
Steps:
When making these pages, there are three things to focus on:
Keyword Proximity:
Basically, the rule is that the early on the keyword appears the better. Don’t go overboard, and make really weird sentences/phrases. But your keyword phrase should be found in all locations of the page including:
- The file name
- the TITLE of the page (usually the name of the article)
- the META description & keywords
- the main heading of the article, which should be a H1 tag usually
- and equally important, within the body of the content
What proximity means is that it appears as early as possible in any of these elements. For example the title, “Mortgage Leads You Can Count on” is better than “You can count on our Mortgage leads” since “Mortgage Leads” appears at the beginning of the title. The same is true for the others as well (META tags, heading, content). It’s not always feasible, but do what you can, when you can.
The file name shouldn’t be incredibly long either. Maybe 3 or 4 words tops is ideal (separated by hyphens, and not underscores or spaces).
Keyword Density:
Your keyword phrase should appear a few times throughout the content. Ideally, somewhere between 5% and 12% of the total content of the page; in other words, if your article that you wrote has 100 words, and your target keyword phrase “Utah mortgage leads” occurs twice within that content, then that represents 6 words out of 100, or a 6% keyword density. Longer pages need lower keyword density, and you should have at least a couple hundred words per article. You can even research your competitors since keyword density varies per industry and search engine.
Cross-linking:
While writing articles, think how to build natural links across to highly related (or thematically related) articles, including other sections/areas of your site. Let’s say you have a sentence like “we have the best mortgage leads on the planet” You would want to link the phrase “mortgage leads” to your main mortgage leads overview page (assuming you have one) not only because the keyword is exact match, but the site visitor may see that and think “hey, I will click on that and check out these leads.” Cross linking helps site visitors, and search engines to rank your site better for the words you use in the links.
Warning: something like “click here to go to my homepage” is a big no-no. Not only are people smarter than that, but it will only help you if you are trying to get your site ranked high for “click here.”
Maybe even for simplicity’s sake, you could do something like “Related Articles” at the bottom of each page, then link a few related articles.
Careful Targeting:
You can only target one keyword phrase per page—do not try to focus on 2 different phrases on a single page.
You can also use variations on the same phrase (like a plural version) or the words in a different order; sometimes even a synonym is okay too. This are is a bit gray area since for example the word “MLM” (multi-level-marketing) is just another name for “network marketing ” or perhaps even “home based business.” Search engines sometimes understand these as the same, but I wouldn’t count on it just yet. What about “shopping cart” and “shopping cart software“? Might those be considered the same by some search engines?
One thing I do us use “tags” at the bottom of the article that are basically other very similar keywords that someone might use to try to find this article. The tags won’t have a lot of power on their own, but in combination with other words in the article, it helps. Don’t try to fool search engines or real people by putting lots of useless, and less relevant tags on the page. The more you dilute it with unrelated stuff, the less power your page has as a whole, and the more likely your site will be penalized for spamming. I don’t want to scare anyone except for those that are thinking about stretching this principle or any others beyond the natural.
Summary
- Great content = great search engine traffic and real visitors.
- When you are writing, think about how early it appears in each of the elements. (proximity)
- Make sure the keyword appears more than once in the article (density)
- When you are done, think about how you can link your articles together to help people and search engines.
- Be careful to target your words properly, and make relevant tags if needed.
You can use a free blogging platform like Blogger (not really very customizable, but super easy to setup), or WordPress (you may need help to install on your own hosting account, but more customizable). In fact, this blog uses Wordpress.
If you do promote links to your website form other websites, you can even promote them to link to link to these specific pages even (so don’t ever move pages on your site if you don’t need to). There’s a lot more to it than that when it comes to linking, but I will save that for another day.
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