ch top. Single Keyword v Keyword Phrases Generally speaking youre better off targeting phrases not single words. For most businesses theres simply too much competition for single keywords. For instance if youre in computer rankmaniac 2012 sales your normally wouldnt choose computers as your keyword. Go to Google and search for computers and youll see why There are nearly 200 million results and the top rankings are dominated by the multinationals at the time of rankmaniac 2012 writing Apple and rankmaniac 2012 Dell. Whats more research shows that customers are becoming more searchsavvy theyre searching for more and more specific rankmaniac 2012 strings. Theyre learning that by being more specific they find what theyre looking for much faster. So instead of targeting computers try to think of a
more specific
keyword phrase. Ask yourself whats unique about your business Perhaps you sell cheap second hand computers Then why not use cheap second hand computers as your keyword phrase This way youll not only stand a rankmaniac 2012 chance in the rankings youll also display in much more targeted searches. In other words a higher percentage of your sites visitors will be people looking to buy cheap second hand computers as opposed to people after brand new computers people researching the history of the computer and people trying to figure out how they can use a computer to bath their dog. Develop a keyword strategy Also think about developing a keyword strategy. rankmaniac 2012 If you start out targeting a very specific keyword phrase as described above make sure it includes the more rankmaniac 2012 generic hotly contested single keyword. For example youll notice that the keyword phrase above cheap second hand computers includes the single keyword computers. rankmaniac 2012 This way youre really targeting both at once. As your sites importance or PageRank and search engine presence increases youll start to rank for the single word as well. In time youll start ranking well for computers even though youre only actively targeting cheap second hand computers. TIP Google PageRank PR is how Google scores a websites importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10. By downloading the Google Toolbar from httptoolbar.google.com you can view the PR of any site you visit. Chapter Summary Find out what words your customers are searching for and make them your keywords. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 16 Step 3 Choose your keywords 16 Use keyword phrases
instead of single keywords but develop a long term keyword strategy which will increase your ranking for hotly contested single keywords even as you target your specific keyword phrase. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 17 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 17 Step 4 Optimize rankmaniac 2012 Your Website for Search Engines Once youve figured out what words your customers are using at the search engines you need to use those words frequently on your site and in the right places both within your copy and within your HTML code HTML meta tags. This is a big part of what is rankmaniac 2012 known as optimizing your website for search engines. There are also some site structure or information architecture and web design considerations discussed below. TIP When you optimize your website for a particular word youre essentially telling the search engines to include you in the results when people search for that word. How high up the rankings you appear depends largely on the number of links back to rankmaniac 2012 your site there are. For more information on generating backlinks see Step 5 Generate links back to your site on p.27. Optimizing your web copy The trick to optimizing your copy is using the most important keywords frequently and in the right places without compromising the readability of your copy. But how do you define frequently And what are the right places What if you want to target a few different rankmaniac 2012 keywords And for that matter what should the wordcount of my pages be Below are a few tips which will help you out. What should the rankmaniac 2012 wordcount of my pages be Youll hear a lot about the importance of a lot of content. While I definitely agree that content is king there is no need to write volumes. You can reach the top of the search engines with a page wordcount of between 1001000. Below 100 is probably too little for the search engines. Above 1000 is definitely too much for your visitors. Certainly dont be intimidated into writing pages and pages of copy for your home page or any other page where short succinct copy is required. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty rankmaniac 2012 Ltd 18 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 18 How many times should I use a keyword You dont want to fill every page up with every keyword youre targeting. This simply dilutes your sites relevance and reduces readability. Search engines and visitors alike will object the search engines will see your site as spam and visitors to your site rankmaniac 2012 will find it rankmaniac 2012 hard to read if not meaningless. A good rule of thumb is to aim for a sitewide average keyword density of around 2 measured using LiveKeywordAnalysis httpwww.livekeywordanalysis.com. Density is a measure rankmaniac 2012 of frequency in relation to the total wordcount of the page. So if your page has 200 words and your keyword phrase appears 10 times its density is 5. When you actually try to do this youll see that 2 isnt easy to achieve. The easiest way to do it is to be specific. As you write every sentence ask yourself Could rankmaniac 2012 I be more specific For example dont just say our computers or our products ask yourself if you can get away with saying our cheap second hand computers. Similarly dont say things like with our help instead say with the help of our cheap second hand computers. Once you get the hang of it youll find there are more than enough opportunities to replace a generic term with your keyword phrase. Obviously theres a bit of an art to it. Sometimes it ends up just sounding like youre repeating your keyword phrase over and over again. If this happens you may just need to restructure the sentence or paragraph. Remember your site reflects the quality of your rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012 product or service. If your site is hard to read people will infer a lot about your offering Readability is allimportant to visitors. And after all its the visitors who buy your product or service not the search engines. NOTE You dont need to be paranoid about density. You can have some pages which have a high density and some which have a low density. What if I want to target more than one keyword Its best to only target one keyword per page. If rankmaniac 2012 you try
to target more your keywords will be competing against each other diluting each others impact. If you rankmaniac 2012 need to target more than one keyword simply create a page for each. For example divide your Second Hand Computers site into separate pages for Macs and PCs and then segment again into Notebooks Desktops etc. This way youll be able to incorporate very specific keyword phrases into your copy e.g. For your Macs page focus on cheap second hand macs. For the PCs page focus on cheap second hand pcs etc. See Link paths on p.22 for information on using text links between these pages. Where should I use my keywords When assessing what your website is about search engines pay close attention to the words you use in your text links and headings. rankmaniac 2012 So make sure your links and headings are keyword rich. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 19 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 19 Using keywords in links When you link from one page to another try to use your target keyword as the link text the part thats normally blue and underlined. For rankmaniac 2012 example on your Cheap Second Hand Macs page you could include a text link to Cheap Second Hand PCs. IMPORTANT Search engines and humans like different things when it comes rankmaniac 2012 to links. Search engines like to see your keywords used rankmaniac 2012 toward the top of the page. So if youre using keywords in your links it makes sense that you put the links at the top of the page. Unfortunately humans tend to find this distracting. And because they start clicking on links before theyve finished reading the whole page they become easily lost and dont grasp the intended message. In most cases visitors prefer a text link at the bottom of the page. But there is a solution if you have links within the main body of your copy simply make them unmarked i.e. remove the rankmaniac 2012 blue font colour and the underlining. To do this include the following in your CSS file style typetextcss a rankmaniac 2012 textdecoration none style Then format the HTML of each link as follows As well as providing cheap second hand Macs we sell high quality a hrefpcs.htm styletextdecorationnonefont color000000cheap second hand pcsfonta. Using keywords in headings Just as customers rely on headings to scan your site so to do search engines. This means headings play a big part in how the rankmaniac 2012 search engines will index your site. Try to include your keyword phrase in your headings. In fact think about inserting extra headings just for this purpose. Generally this will also help the readability of the site because it will help customers scan read. For example if you have a page detailing the benefits of cheap second hand computers you could break it up into logical sections rankmaniac 2012 with the following headings. The cost benefits of cheap our second hand computers The technical benefits of our cheap second hand computers SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 20 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 20 The support benefits of our cheap second hand computers Using keywords at the start of the page Many SEO experts believe that the search engines see words at the start of a page as more representative of w