It was a dark and stormy night. Out of the shadowy alley saunters a trench-coated man, collar turned up, face obscured by the brim of a black fedora. He casually sidles up to the red-haired woman at the bus stop. "I've heard that Piccadilly Circus is beautiful this time of year," he says in the most casual of tones. She slowly exhales pungent cigarette smoke through pursed lips and replies, languidly, "But I really do miss the clowns." The man smirks back, "I heard they all went on strike for bigger company cars." The Redhead quickly glances into his square-jawed face and whispers, "Come on, our ride is waiting." They hurry off through the rain and fog to a waiting taxicab and disappear into the night.
Getting your Secret Password exactly right can be the difference between life and death for the movie spy. How else can they tell friend from foe? In the mysterious world of internet searches, it's the humble Keyword. Like a Cold War spymaster, Google and other search engines test each website they encounter to see if it belongs in the returns pages or not, and how high it should rank.
Your website, whether it's a brilliant masterpiece of graphic design or a static page with your phone number and a 15 year old photo of your shop, will not do anything but cost you money if you ignore the rules of the game.
As soon as you publish a blog entry on your site, Google interrogates it looking for a number of different factors. Chief among these are keywords. At issue are not only how well-chosen your keyword is, but how it's used on the page. Here's what we mean:
Choosing your Keyword
Think for a long time about how you want searchers to find you. What do they type into the little box to find what they are looking for? Are they using a phone to do it? Then they might be talking to it instead of typing, so keep it simple. In our case, we know that many of our current clients typed in "SEO Savannah" and found us as the first entry on page one of the returns. For us, that's a keyword that pulls a lot of freight.
In the Meta Title and Meta Description
This short phrase appears in at least two places: The tab at the top of the browser window and the little blurb that appears in the search results:
The Tab:
Search Results:
The Meta Description never appears on the website page itself. No, it surreptitiously makes itself known only to the "crawlers" that scan the internet for content to include in returns.
Limit the Meta Description to 150 characters or less, or you'll see it gets cut off in the blurb, like ours did. Maybe you want to do it on purpose, for the suspense:
"Ooooh! What does it do?!?! MUST CLICK!
Opportunities to enter text for Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions are usually found in the publishing tool you use for your website, like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, HubSpot, Weebly, Wix and so on.
Headings and Subheadings
The biggest headings are labeled "h1." The next smaller is "h2" and so on. Each heading should differ from the Meta Title, at least a little bit. Think of them as subtopics on the page that give you another chance to install your search keyword on the page.
The subheading for this section is an "h2" level and gets noticed by the search engine as important to the content. If it's pertinent, that's good! And if it contains a keyword, even better! At the end of this blog post, I've included our keyword for today: SEO Savannah GA
The Body Text
Herein lies a balance, expressed by this proverb:
"Be neither too profligate nor stingy with your keyword, for both lead down a pernicious road to lower search rankings."
Keyword stuffing is a no-no and Google knows when you do this. Consider the following:
Our patented sunscreen is a product that, compared to other patented sunscreens is far better. All patented sunscreens are not alike. Some patented sunscreens are awesome and some are terrible. You'll find that our patented sunscreens are just what you need…
Not only is that barely readable, but the smart robots that see that will flag it as stuffed, and this poor page will never make it past page ten of sunscreen search results.
Include your keyword no more than twice in a paragraph. Make it natural and readable.
Images
Definitely include some kind of graphics, video, audio and photos. Since the crawlers can't really "see" them, they look instead at the label you've given them. When you insert a touch of multimedia, make sure you find the tool that gives you the opportunity to fill in the alt-tag. Put your awesome keyword there and Google will like it!
Anchor text
Links are also attractive to search engines. One study showed that of the top 50 search results for about 15,000 keywords 99.2% had some species of external link. You should have at least one internal link (to another page on your site) and one external link (to another source pertinent to your topic). And, NEVER do this:
For more information, click here
Instead, use a keyword, or an important content phrase as the link anchor:
For more information we have a page on the chemistry of our patented sunscreen
It's yet another way to optimize your content for both the reader and the search engines.
So now you know something about using your special keywords consistently across each page of your website. You may not be sidling up to redheads at bus stops in the middle of the night, but you can affect the future of your company or client by learning the dark alley, cloak-and-dagger world of the SEO master.
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See what happens when you take the time to make your site a honey trap for search engines. Search on your own keywords to see where you rank. If you're on page 3, position 7 today, you’ll see it move up over time by simply paying attention to our SEO friend, the Keyword. And if it moves up, more leads will see it. And when more leads see it, they click on it, and… well, you know the rest of the story!
SEO Savannah GA
United Webworks has been helping the good people of Savannah, Atlanta, and some other far-flung cities, optimize their effectiveness on the internet with the goal of bringing in LEADS. We like cool websites, but we LOVE making them work for you, building your business and helping you reach your business goals. Find out how you can increase leads without the time and pressure of finding them yourself!
