How to Optimize Your Web Presence: Step 2 of 4 on Getting the Most SEO Bang for Your Buck
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011This is part two in a four part series on the 4 Steps to Getting the Most SEO Bang for your Buck.
So you just finished getting all of your best keywords and phrases. Now what do you do with them? Optimize for them.
Website
Your website is obviously going to be one of the most important places for your keywords. A few key things to remember:
- Optimize page-by-page. Your homepage is going to include a lot of your bigger keywords and act as an umbrella page. Deeper pages are going to get more and more specific.
- Keyword usage is dependent on the length of whatever space we’re talking about. If you only have 200 words on a page, don’t use a given keyword more than 2 times. If you have closer to 500 words, you can use the keyword 3 or maybe 4 times.
- It’s about balance. Optimizing for keywords should never trump writing for your audience. Make sure your copy still makes sense for your users.
Where to put your keywords on the website:
- Title tag – Front load your most important keywords, and don’t use a keyword more than twice here. Include your company name last and your location, if you have a brick-and-mortar location.
- Domain/URL – If you have an established domain/URL, don’t change it! But if you’re just building your site, keep your keywords in mind.
- Navigation – We all need About and Contact pages, and while they aren’t necessarily keyword rich, they’re necessary. For other page names, make sure you don’t stuff your keywords.
- Meta-description – Not only good for a marketing message, but also a great spot for keywords.
- Header – Be careful here: describe the page without stuffing your keywords. And remember: you can have more than one header tag on a page!
- Links – Google (and your users, for that matter) don’t understand what happens when you “click here” or “learn more”. Make sure you link keyword rich phrases to other pages on your website.
- Copy – Of course! Include your keywords – and very importantly, variations of them – in the copy.
Blog
Your blog provides a huge opportunity to target niche sets of keywords. By default, your Content Management System (CMS) may offer different setups, but typically all blogs will offer the following:
- Each new blogpost is a new web page. Therefore, you have one more opportunity to rank well at the search engines.
- The title of your post is also the title tag of the page (unless it’s overridden by a plugin), so make it keyword rich.
- You can further optimize by applying categories and tags to your posts.
- Blogposts are great link bait; for as we all know: the more (relevant) incoming links, the better.
Social Media
Use the keyword analysis you did to uncover terms to use on your social profiles, too!
On Facebook, branded keywords will certainly help people find you; but make sure you also use keywords within posts. Searches on Facebook could cause your fan page to come up in the results!
Twitter yields a larger opportunity: with tools like Twitter search, Twellow, NearbyTweets, and more, you have the opportunity to be found by people using your
On LinkedIn, use your keywords in your profile, especially in your profile heading. Participate in Groups and the Answers section that also use those keywords.
Articles
Don’t forget to use your keywords in any articles or guest posts you write. Many of the same rules will apply from the website/blog, but also remember that you can apply categories when submitting your articles. Also, don’t forget to include a keyword rich link back to your website!
Next time we’ll talk about measuring your success.












When’s the last time you revamped the copy on your website?

