For a website to rank highly in the search engine results pages (SERP), it usually requires some form of optimisation.
There are a range of techniques involved in optimising a site but one of the most important is to find out which words are being typed into the search engines by potential viewers, and to then optimise the site for these particular words.
These words are commonly known as keywords and also key phrases.
Keywords are typically added to the content of the web page that is visible, as well as the code behind the content that the viewer does not see, such as alt tags.
Keywords chosen should be in keeping with the context of the site content and overall theme of the website. Ideally, someone who has a good knowledge of the business in question should select most of the core keywords.
Once these base keywords have been chosen they can then be used to view statistics to find out how often these terms are actually being queried in search engines. Other keyword research tools can then be used to find similar or more widely searched terms that are not already on the list.
The end result should be a comprehensive list of the most searched keywords as well as any niche terms used in the industry. These keywords can then be grouped and extended to make additional phrases (see below).
It often makes sense to target longer, more specific key phrases with which to optimise a page. These are known as long tail keywords.
There is greater potential for quality traffic by targeting long tail keywords as it is more likely the searcher knows exactly what product they are looking for, and by landing on the correct page the likelihood of a sale is significantly increased.
In addition, there will also be less websites competing for these keywords, and it will be easier to achieve a high ranking in the search engines.
Targeting broader search terms may bring viewers to a site but often, because of the ambiguity of the keywords chosen, many will not be interested in the page as it is not what they expected.
For example, a company selling software online may want to optimise their site for the keyword 'software'. However, someone requiring software to edit their photographs are far more likely to search using terms such as 'photo software' or 'photo editing software'.
To target for an even more specific search, multiple pages could be created, each optimised for popular products such as 'Adobe photo editing software' or 'Corel photo editing software'.
This will lead to far more actual sales than trying to rank for the term 'software' where many searchers are looking for free software, programming jobs, support for application software etc.
Once the final draft of keywords and phrases have been chosen, the next step is to add them to the website.
Each keyword should be assigned to a single page on the site. Any other keywords that are used are then assigned to other individual pages. This ensures maximum coverage for the chosen keyword and ensures its value is not diluted by competing terms.
This can potentially be widened to two or three phrases per page if they are very similar in relevance, however, ideally, a new page should be created for any alternative keywords that have the potential to draw in customers searching for different phrases.
Each page is then optimised for its allocated keyword. This involves adding the keyword, together with other related terms to the content. The content should be as informative and in-depth as possible. The keywords should be integrated in such a way that the content flows naturally and is still meaningful.
The page content (the main body of text) should be unique. Simply duplicating existing content and changing keywords does not work. Duplicate content is easily found by search engines and at the very least the page will simply not be ranked but, potentially, the domain could be blacklisted.
Also 'keyword stuffing', whereby words are repeated many times on a page without any relevancy to the content but purely for the purpose of search engines, should be avoided as it adds no value to rankings and is easily tracked and penalised by search engines. More importantly, this is highly likely to turn away any potential customers who have reached the site.
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