These days, when you are starting a new web site or blog, it helps to plan your content so that it is interesting to your audience and also attractive to search engines. One thing that helps to accomplish both is to have unique content. Even if you are reusing your own material from another web site or blog, you should put in a few changes to update it for the audience and to keep search engines from thinking that it is duplicate content that should be ignored.
Making a site more attractive to search engine is one of the best ways to grow an audience since because potential new users will be able to find your site or blog while searching for something related to content. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the big buzz phrase you may have heard about, and if you think you should know something about it, you are right. The 5 step SEO process described here is pretty simple, very free, and after reading this post you may want to use the process yourself.
Step 1: Plan on Making it Useful to Your Audience
Unique content should be the foundation of your site or blog, as well as an understanding of what your audience wants. Also, focus on the audience’s needs and not your own needs. One simple philosophy that follows this advice is to give the people what they want, and just a little of what you think they need.
Step 2: Find the Best Sites and Blogs on the Subject
Whatever it is you are planning to do, someone else has probably done it before. If you can find the very best sites or blogs in your area of interest, you will probably find excellent examples of what to do, what not to do, and where you can best contribute. If you understand what you are writing about, you probably already have an idea of what kind of information the best web sites on a subject would have. Using a search engine to find the sites that rank high for relevant keywords is a good basic technique, but if you want to be systematic about it, first write down the keywords that you think are relevant, then review the top results in your search, and after looking at the contents of five to ten decent sites, focus on the three to five that have superior information.
Step 3: Find the Hottest Keywords and Key Phrases on Those Sites
Once you have a list of these key sites, put them through Google’s Keyword Tool to find out the most relevant and popular keywords or key phrases that are associated with these sites. These top sites became that way in part because the sites ranked highly in relevant search engine searches. If these words and phrases are relevant to your site or blog, then using them will make it easier for a new visitor to find you.
Step 4: Find Out the Trends of These Keywords and Key Phrases
Once you identify keywords and key phrases of interest, you should get an idea of how often people use those terms in searches. Google Trends can easily show what terms are on the upswing and what terms are on the way out. You can even compare two terms to see which ones are doing better. You can use this tool to figure out which of your many alternative words or phrases you may want to use, or if you want to use some more than others.
Step 5: Put These Keywords or Key Phrases in Your Site or Blog
If you have done your work it Step 1, you probably have a lot of these words and phrases already in your content. Remember that you want to make your work useful to your audience, so only add the keywords and key phrases in Step 3 if it makes sense in the context of your work. You should also include these words and phrases whenever possible within the HTML tags for the page title and description, as well as in the ‘alt’ field for any image tag that you use. Also, try to put them in the heading tags as well as in the body of your text.
Author: Todd Curtis, PhD
Five Steps You Can Take to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
As you may know, search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of creating a website and website content to attract qualified visitors from search engines.
Beginners SEO - Top 5 Tips to Improve Your Rankings
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to the process of optimising a website to be search engine friendly.
5 Essential Steps to Make Your Site Search & Social Media Friendly
Here are five ways to make your website search and social media friendly. … reviews and media being shared.
Mail this post
Recent Comments