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Search Engine Optimization
(cont'd)
Step 3.
Content and Site Preparation. You've done your research: You
know which keywords match your message, and your site's HTML code is
one big search engine welcome mat. Now it's time to make sure that
your site contains those keywords. This is where I most often see
folks get confused -- should you rewrite your web content to
emphasize keywords? Yes, but with extreme caution. Should you make
small, appropriate changes? Yes. Here are my guidelines for content
preparation.
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Don't write for keywords (much). This almost always leads to
stilted, hard-to-read prose. Writing keyword-rich content that
really works for users is an art form. Be careful.
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Do a little careful editing. If you use the word 'car' but
'auto' is the keyword you need, chances are you can do a few
replacements without marring your carefully crafted copy.
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Spend time on the titles and description tags. Make sure every
page in your site has a unique, relevant TITLE and DESCRIPTION
tag.
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Never use an automatic page generator. Tools like WebPosition
Gold offer to generate optimized pages for you. Don't. They tend
to hurt your ranking as much as help, and they generate ugly,
ugly pages.
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Write more stuff. More content is almost always better. If your
site is just missing a specific keyword or phrase, but you think
it's important, then your potential customers probably do too.
By adding a few more pages, or a white paper, or some other
content focusing on those absent keywords, you'll likely help
visitors and improve your keyword ranking at the same time. And,
the more text-rich your site is, the better the odds that you'll
catch longer, stranger but really important key phrases that you
can't anticipate.
Step 4. Link Analysis. Quite a few major search engines (Google,
most importantly) weigh your 'link popularity' when ranking your
site. A more accurate term, though, is 'link analysis', because
these engines don't just count up the number of links to your site.
They look for links near and containing relevant text. So a page
full of links, one of which happens to be yours, won't help very
much. But a link from a related site, near a short paragraph that
contains relevant keywords, will probably give you a boost. Having
keywords in the link itself is even better. A quick example:
http://www.portentinteractive.com
doesn't help much.
For search engine optimization, visit
http://www.portentinteractive.com is much better.
For search engine optimization,
visit Portent Interactive where 'search engine optimization'
is the link to Portent, is the absolute best case.
There
are a few ways to build your link popularity:
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Contact sites that relate to yours and request a link exchange.
This works really well, but obviously takes a long time.
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Syndicate your content. If you can provide an easy way for
interested webmasters to link directly to relevant stories on
your site, you provide an instant link popularity boost, and get
your message out to boot.
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Start an affiliate program. If you sell a product, consider
setting up an affiliate sales program.
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