CreationIS – Internet Services

Getting Googled – part 4

In my last blog about getting googled, I shared with you the importance of getting your “title”, “description” and your “keywords” correct for each page of your web site.

<title>Place Title of this web page</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”20 word description of this web page” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”5 – 8 relevant keywords for this page” />

See: Getting Googled – part 3 for more details on this aspect of search engine optimization.

Today I want to briefly discuss the importance of your content, and making each page unique and thus worthy to be indexed. As I am sure I have stated before, and may repeat again because it is so important – search engine optimization (SEO) begins BEFORE you start to create your web site. It is initialized during the building of your web site design, and continually modified (to keep it current) after you build your web site.

I like to break it down like this:

1. Concept
2. Initialization
3. Creation
4. Modification

Don’t wait until the end to go back and have someone fix your web site, costing you lost time and more money. If you are a do-it-yourself type of person, few minutes well planned can save you time, money and disappointment later down the road.

Content Rich Keywords

As a web designer I am constantly looking at web sites, and truthfully, I see the same mistakes repeated over and over again. In a media where content is still king, many people write their text for their web sites emphasizing their company rather than what the customer is looking for. It is the difference between writing for people and writing for search engines. And in good, keyword rich content you will need to do both. Your sentences must be compelling, clear and easy to read for people to follow the flow of your offering. And your content needs to be filled with the types of words that people will use to search for your product or service – not necessarily business name. Ninety percent of the time, people are not using your business name to find you on the Internet. That means your business name is not relevant as part of the most important text on your web site. They will see your logo and /or name once they find you, and it is usually placed in a graphical header.

They search with specific products or services in mind, and, quite often, with a specific location. Therefore, if you create custom leather boots and you only service the San Fransisco area with your product, then those are some of the main keywords you want to include in the first paragraph of your content. Something like this:

Custom Leather Boots

Hand-crafted Italian Leather

“Specializing in custom leather boots, RenBoots has been serving the San Fransisco area for over 20 years. Hand crafted boots made from the finest Italian leather, custom fit for your personal needs. Why? Because no two people are the same.”

Now, not only were we able to add your keywords “custom leather boots” twice, and your location “San Francisco”; we were able to include the name of your company, a personal touch of customer service and experience in the business (adding credibility); we did it all in just a couple of sentences.

Notice that above the text we added a little highlighting with the <h2>, and <h3> tags. This is highly recommended at the head of each page to have at least one “header text” utilizing your keywords. Now, time to add a couple of more paragraphs (between 450 – 600 words) and you are finished with the first page.

Finally: the designing rules to follow for your keyword rich content are:

• Start the page with a good “header” utilizing <h2> </h2> tag or <h3></h3> tag. Or as above one <h2> and then a “subheader” in <h3>
• Content rich text emphasizing your keywords at the beginning of your paragraphs and near the end – keeping each paragraph short and concise. I like to follow the rule that for every 100 – 150 words make sure you use your keywords at least once, I prefer twice. They don’t always have to be in the exact same order, as you may have notice above. The second time they were used we used them in reverse order to make the sentences (for your human readers) better to digest, but they work as effectively for search engines. This way it doesn’t sound or look like you are search word spamming.
• Finally, sum-up at the bottom of your page with the same keywords while adding new secondary keywords that will lead into your next page adding emphasis to the next flow of progression. At this point you are drawing them in to wanting to read more.

We will talk more about the progression of text for subsequent pages in our next search engine optimization blog. And then we will get down to the importance of your sitemap once the initial phase of your web site design is complete.

Don’t forget to leave some comments if this blog has helped you in any way or if you have something relevant to add for others who are reading this.