When a search engine user types a word or phrase into the search field, the search engine tries to find an internet page that best matches the request. To achieve this, it looks for the requested words to be repeated several times within a page. For example, if someone was looking for information about Scotland-based fly-fishing holidays for Atlantic salmon, they would probably enter “Fly-fishing scotland atlantic salmon” as their keywords.

 

Google and the other search engines have to scour millions of pages on the web to find the handful of pages that best match this specific request.

 

The way they narrow down their options is to try and find a page that has all or most of these keywords in the page's title, metatags and body text. After they have found as many pages as they can with this combination, they rank them on the results page based on the accuracy of the match (and some other criteria, such as how many third party sites link to the page. This is a subject for another article).

 

It follows then that you must try and think through what your customers will be typing into the search engines to find your site. Brainstorm all the obvious words and phrases. Pick the ones that are most relevant and then write an individual, highly targeted article for every keyword phrase.

 

Taking the fishing example above, the article should have all of the keywords in the title:

 

“The 10 Best Atlantic Salmon Fly-fishing Places in Scotland”

 

The metatags for the page should also reflect these words: flyfishing, fly-fishing, Scotland, Atlantic, salmon, ten best, 10 best, etc”. The better content management solutions, such as SubHub (www.subhub.com) will enable you to enter metatags when you input an article.

 

Finally, repeat the keywords in the first paragraph of the article and at least one more time in the body of the article.

 

This combination of keywords will get your page a good ranking.

 

 

1)      Avoid headings that don’t include keywords, e.g., “Adventures North of the Border; The One that Got Away”. Traditional journalists often make this mistake when they write for the web because they have been trained to look for clever headlines with puns and wordplays.

 

2)      Ensure that the article contains useful, accurate and relevant information for your visitor. Many companies advertising themselves as search engines optimisation experts will create keyword-saturated pages that have little relevant information for the visitor. These pages may get good rankings and traffic, but the customer experience will be so poor that you will irritate and frustrate the reader.

 

3)      Don’t repeat the keywords too often within a page because the search engines measure ‘keyword density’. This assesses whether the keywords appear too many times given the overall number of words on the page. This measurement was introduced to stop the so-called SEO experts trying to trick the search engines with their keyword-saturated pages.

 

4)      If you have a good webstats package, it will tell you what keywords people are typing into the search engines to find your site. Look at these logs to help you decide what articles you should be writing.

 

5)      Continually add new content. Google and the other search engines will visit your site far more frequently if there is new content to index.

 

6)      It is important to note that successful websites get more traffic through their many individual pages than through their home page. Therefore, treat every page as a landing page and ensure that someone visiting your site for the first time will have a good experience. Most important is enabling them to quickly and easily navigate to other areas of the site from any page.

 

7)      Remember that over 80% of searches have three or more keywords.