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For your website to rank highly on search engine results it must become a search engine magnet. You must employ carefully thought out tactics to ensure it is not overlooked by the web spiders that the all powerful search engines use to find out what exists in the big wide world of the internet. In short, it must be search engine optimized.
One key area that SEO experts can help with is in the creation of SEO friendly website content. But great SEO experts will also ensure that it is audience friendly. So how do these sought after SEO experts help you to achieve this?
Identifying Keyword Phrases
The main element of SEO for website content hinges on the keywords used within the text. To identify appropriate keywords, or more accurately, keyword phrases, you simply need to think as your potential clients do. If someone is looking for a great catering company to provide mouth watering dishes for granny’s 80th birthday in downtown Toronto, you can bet your bottom dollar that they won’t conduct a Google search using the words, ‘reputable establishment providing excellent quality meals for parties’. It’s far more likely they will search for, ‘Catering Company for birthday parties in Toronto’ or words along those lines.
And this is how you begin to identify your keywords. Get into the mindset of your target market and think as they do. Narrow down a list of keyword phrases that you believe your target market will use when searching for a company like yours. When you work with a professional SEO company, they will review the proposed keywords to see how appropriate they are and how well they can help in the rankings. They will use professional software to narrow down the keyword phrases and to decide upon the final ones to incorporate in your website content.
Consider the example above, a keyword phrase of ‘Catering Company for birthday parties’ while accurate would be far too broad. Even if your website did appear high in the rankings, it would be of absolutely no use to someone living outside the Toronto area. This is where the SEO experts can advise and guide you. A far better keyword phrase would be ‘Catering Company in Toronto’. You want targeted leads to find you, ones whose requirements you know you can meet, and exceed. If someone is looking for a catering company in Toronto and your website shows on page one of the rankings there is a high probability that they will click through to see what you have to offer. And if they like what they see, they will contact you for more information or to make a booking.
Positioning of Keyword Phrases
Once the keyword phrases are identified, the SEO experts will start to integrate them into the less visible parts of your website. They will cunningly incorporate them into all manner of things such as the Meta title and Meta description which are short sentences to describe your website and its offering. These are critically important because these are the words that appear in the search results. These phrases need to attract the would-be client by showing how closely your offerings match their requirements, and must be sufficiently persuasive to encourage the client to click through to your website.
The SEO experts will also add the keyword phrases to the H1, H2 and H3 tags – the tags linked to titles, subtitles and sub-headers. All of these elements are essential to get right if your website is going to rank highly for these keyword phrases.
Your defined keyword phrases also need to be added to the website text. The skill of the SEO expert is to get an optimal keyword phrase density. Most experts recommend a density of around 4% – which is 4 keywords in every 100 words of text. This will flag your website rather nicely to the search engines with respect to those chosen keyword phrases.
Think About Your Audience
This is when you need to put yourself in the shoes of your audience once again. If you have ever tried to force certain words into a nicely flowing text it’s all too easy to turn it into a difficult read. No longer does the text seamlessly move from one point to another – it has been hijacked by the inclusion of words that appear unnecessary. For your reader, the paragraphs have now become confusing and stilted and the reader needs to work far harder to understand your key messages. So why would they stay on your website when so many easier-to-read websites are available to browse? Simply put, they won’t.
Even if you do place your keyword phrases sensibly within a flowing text, you must never, ever deviate from the golden rule that Content is King. When the text flows wonderfully your audience will be less than impressed if it is dry, boring or factually incorrect.
Think About the Search Engines
Worse still a poorly constructed webpage overloaded with keywords will not be seen favorably by the search engines. Their magnificent algorithms are clever enough to analyze website text and if they identify poor sentence construction they won’t be recommending your website by placing it high in the results. In fact your website will be penalized. You can’t blame the search engines – it’s just the way they have been programmed to try to provide the searcher with the best possible match for their search.
So What’s the Answer?
It’s quite clear that when people talk about SEO friendly website content there is a lot more to consider than throwing a load of keywords into each paragraph. The bottom line is that an inappropriate use of keyword phrases can completely backfire: not only do your visitors give up and bounce off your website in annoyance, but the search engines completely overlook your website as they think you are guilty of keyword stuffing. To get effective SEO for your website that really improves rankings, great SEO experts will follow these simple steps:
