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How to write for search engines
It is extremely important to
write web articles in such a way that they can be found by search
engines. Both keywords and meta tags will help accomplish this.
Writing for
search engines is critical to generate traffic for your website.
Most sites get well over 50% of their traffic from search engines.
Google, Yahoo!
And Bing are the big three search engines, and account for nearly
all search traffic to your site. When people type words into
the search field of a search engine, if your site does not appear
on page one or two of the search engine result pages (SERPs)
then you will not be generating the traffic you want.
Search engines work by sending automated bots or spiders throughout
the web that read websites and index or categorize them and store
them in huge databases. When people search for words or phrases,
the search engine scans through its database to find the websites
that best match what the user is looking for. Being at the top
of page one in SERPs is the lifeblood of many e-commerce websites.
Accordingly, most national brands spend a lot of money constantly
optimizing their sites for better and better SERP rankings. This
is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. However, big site
or small, your site can rank high in SERPs using the same basic
techniques.
Relevant content
By far the most important single factor is to have the content on your site
be as relevant as possible to the words or phrases (keywords) a potential
visitor is searching for. To accomplish this, you must first figure out what
keywords people might typically type into a search engine to find a site
like yours. This may be intuitive, but it is best to simply do some research
as a starting point.
Start by typing keywords into Google that you would use to find your site.
Take a look at the results if you are on page one, congratulations! If not,
look at the sites that appear on page one and study their content for clues
about what they have that you dont.
If you use Google
Analytics or a similar web metrics tool, start by reviewing the main
keywords people use to find you already (screen that of GA search terms).
Then ask people in your target audience what words they would search for
to find a site like yours.
Keyword density
Its easiest to rank high on SERPs if
you have good keyword density with high demand/low supply keywords. For example,
fewer people search for home blood pressure check as search for high blood
pressure. To rank high, you want to identify the phrases with relatively high
demand and low supply. In this case, home blood pressure check is a lower supply
phrase, because it appears on fewer web pages than the phrase high blood pressure.
There are several keyword tools available (eg: Wordtracker, WordStream)
that can help you determine popular phrases or keywords. Searching in Google
can also help you find high demand/low supply keywords.
- Choose one or two main
keywords for each article based on high demand/low supply,
and create several keyword phrases to target in current and
future updates
- Write an original article
using the keywords in the file name, titles, the first sentence,
and the last sentence. Repeat the keyword and synonyms a few
times throughout the article.
- Calculate keyword density:
divide the number of keywords by the number of total words,
aiming for 4 to 6 percent keyword density.
- If needed, edit the article
down to increase keyword density.
Meta tags
Another extremely important
way to optimize a website for search engines is meta tags. Meta
tags provide information about your web page to the search engine
spiders so that the search engines can categorize your website
and include it in their search results.
Meta tag code is inserted at the beginning of your html code
between the <head> and </head> tags. There are
meta tags for page title, page description, and page keywords
with a range of other fields that can also control when and
how a spider indexes your site. The page title and description
the most important parts of meta tags, whereas meta keywords
are not as important because they are ignored by most search
engines. This
article goes much further in depth about meta tags.
Web tools
There are several resources on the
web you can use to help optimize your website content for search engines. The
easiest to use are Google's Webmasters tools:
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
With the help of this site, you can have a Google spider crawl through your
site in order to index your site on Google. Also, you can use these tools
to see your websites indexed keywords, and see how many hits your site is
getting on Google. You need to have a Google account to use the webmaster
tools (its easy to set one up if you don't have one).
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