Did You Follow These 5 Search Engines Optimization Steps?

With search engine optimization coming into prominence these past few years, the playing field has become more level and the Davids of the business world have a legitimate chance against the Goliaths – only if the content of their website is optimized for search engines.

At the core of a good content piece tailored for SEO is a keyword, but having your main keyword is just the start of good page optimization. When beginning work on optimizing a piece, a good content generator tends to keep these rules in mind:

Research a keyword thoroughly

There are an endless amount of tools readily available for you to use out there. This is where your starting point should be. Ask yourself – “What am I trying to discuss in this article?” “Who’s going to be reading this article?” and “What will they type into Google, Yahoo, or Bing to find my article?” As you ask yourself these questions, start taking note of any keywords that you start hearing over and over.

The second part is to take those keywords and place them into your keyword volume tool in order to determine which keywords have the most search volume. Make sure that you are not swaying away from your overall meaning of your article. To take this process a further step, you want to then see the competitiveness of the keyword. The less competition the more likely you’ll rank higher. There are several ways to do this. The easiest way to do this is to simply conduct a Google search. Just place your keyword into quotes and see your results.

Forget about the keyword. Focus on the content

Now that you have found your keyword, forget about it! Keywords are the backbone of SEO writing but any experienced copywriter who works in SEO can tell you that they should be used sparingly to create relevant, meaningful content that would actually teach a reader something new without making the inner workings of SEO readily apparent. Although the keywords help, the real truth of getting your content ranked higher in search engines is to create quality content that people would like to share with their friends or colleagues.

Use the keyword sparingly.

In the early days of search engine optimization, there were writers who would direct people to their sites by loading pages with keywords that people searched for, only for those pages to contain nothing of worth to the person who had searched for it. Search engines quickly came to identify this practice and produced algorithms that disregarded such pages that employed these sorts of “black-hat keyword stuffing” methods.

After you create the content, go back into the piece and make sure that you’re not using your keyword more than once for every 150 words. That should do the trick.

Use secondary keywords

The same tools that show you how many people search for a specific keyword, will also often bring up other related keywords. These keywords are called secondary keywords. Search engines view these keywords as being highly relevant to your primary keyword. Make sure that you take some of these secondary keywords and place them throughout your content.

Link out to relevant sources

Spreading links throughout written copy to sources of information related to what you offer increases the legitimacy of the writing. When you link out to relevant sources, search engines know that you are actually talking about the thing that you are link to. For example, Google will give you a “thumb’s up” when you are writing about penguins and linking out to pictures of penguins.

Keep these things in mind, along with the tenets of what makes good writing, when writing your SEO copy and you’ll be well on your way to getting your business’s page to the top of the search engine listings.