How to Rank Better with Keywords

We’ve discussed this before, but of course I like to always go back and talk about subjects that were "hot" for our new readers.

Do you have a keyword strategy? If so, please weigh in and leave a comment. If not, check out some steps you may want to consider:

Quality Content
Your number one goal should always be to create quality content for your keywords. It will drive traffic to your site if it is useful and your visitors recommend your site to other visitors.

SEO
There is a lot of advice out on the web regarding SEO and many arguments about what does and does not work but one thing remains constant, if you take the time to optimize your pages for the search engines, you will receive better results than if you didn’t. One popular method is to have your keyword in the headline or H1 title of your page. Make sure the keyword is included in the first and last 25 words on the page. Pay attention to keyword density and don’t overstuff your pages with your keyword, it won’t work.

Blogging and Web 2.0
Your site should have a blog and an RSS feed attached so that you can use them to boost your keyword ranks. Make sure you tag your posts too, Blogger has a form where you can put your keywords (tags) for each blog post and WordPress uses categories that will automatically be seen as tags.

Article Marketing
If you want to be found using your keywords, try writing an article and placing it in a relevant section on your site. Once Google has indexed your site and has found your article (you can speed up the process by uploading a new sitemap and letting Google know about it), go out and syndicate that article by submitting it to other article sites.

Long Tails
You can work off of your master list and use related long tail keywords. Use one of the free keyword searches to find out what the daily searches are and go for the ones that aren’t in high competition if your site is relatively new. If you don't know what a long tail keyword is, please let me know and I'll do another post on that!

Domain names, URLs and Titles
If you haven’t purchased your domain name yet and you know that you are going to have a specific keyword that will relate to your site, buy a domain name with the keyword in it. Make sure that you have your keyword in your URLs to your pages and in your meta and title tags for the page.

Links
Use anchor text incorporating your keyword to link to your page. What that means is, instead of “click here” put the keyword so that it is the underlined linkable text. In addition, try to get quality one-way links from other websites that are related to yours. For instance if you sell baby clothes, try to get a website for moms to link to your site.

Useful Links for keywords:

Google Keyword Selector Tool is great, it can scan your site for existing keywords as well as give you suggestions for related keywords.

Want to see what people have been searching for in the past on Google? Try Google Suggest and start typing in your keyword.

Enter your site url and see what sitereportcard.com has to say about your optimization or keywords. It’s a fun and free tool for you to use.

There are many other tips for getting your keywords to work for you and I’d love to open up a discussion here so that we can help you grow your business. If you are one of my blog readers and you have some advice to share, please post a comment and give us your opinion.

Joanne