Onsite Search Engine Optimization

posted by Ted on December 16, 2011

Every business that desires a strong online presence must take the time to make sure their website is optimized for the most popular search engines if they wish to maximize their returns on their investment. Despite the fact that most online marketing methods are reasonably cheap to implement, they are not usually easy to do. It takes a lot of time and effort, as well as knowledge about the workings of each of the major search engines.

Google accounts for about 65% of the online searches done in the U.S.  For this reason, a good percentage of website owners and webmasters focus their efforts on what Google is looking for specifically. However, Google has already made over 500 changes to their algorithm (or what they look for) in 2011. The rules of the SEO game are constantly changing, meaning its imperative to keep current on what’s happening in the industry.  What is working for you today may not work tomorrow.

With so many programs and templates around today, it’s incredibly easy to create a website. But, getting a business online is just the first step.  After all, a business website that no one can find has very little chance of helping to increase the bottom line. It can take a good amount of time and significant effort to transform a website into a self-sustaining, profit generating machine. With this in mind, let’s take a look some of the steps that need to be taken to acquire a better search engine ranking for a website.

The first thing that needs to be done is the proper keyword research to find words or phrases that relate to your business.  The most effective ones will be the ones that are used often by people searching for your type of business, but have relatively low competition.

One thing that is often overlooked is the attempt to find ‘money terms’. For example, a business that is running an auto repair shop in Detroit might not want to focus on ‘auto repair’ as a keyword since they would run up against significant competition.  Also, if anyone finds their site using this keyword, the odds are that they are not in the same geographical location. This type of business would be better off finding their own niche within the auto repair industry in Detroit and focusing on popular keywords that relate to it. However, if this company sells auto parts and offers shipping, the geographical location of their site visitors is not as much of an issue. This means the business can truly become ‘global’. The bottom line is to find the best related keywords for a particular style of business.

There are other steps required to optimize a website for particular keywords.  They need to be added to the meta-tags on each page and the content of each page needs to be edited so that they each have the proper keyword density. This is basically the percentage of the total words on each page that are actually the keywords for that page. Most experts state that the optimal density is between 1 and 3%.  Any less than 1%, and the search engines might not pick them up and any more than 3% would likely make the content very hard to read for a casual visitor – and may even get the website penalized for ‘keyword stuffing’.

Once the keyword research and on-page optimization has been completed, it’s a matter of building backlinks to the website using the main keywords as ‘anchor text’.  Please visit our post on Effective Anchor Text for more information on how to utilize this strategy.

 

Tags:keyword research,linking strageties,online marketing,search engine optimization,seo,SERPS