The 10 Biggest Search Engine Optimization Mistakes: #9: No Content Keyword

You’ve spent weeks getting your website design right. Your website is fully ‘optimized’. Or so you think. Why are visitors not finding your website? You’ve probably forgotten to optimize your content by adding keyword phrases!

What do you mean by ‘content’?

You should know by now that you need to have a few hundred words of text based content on each page of your website to attract search engines and help search engines determine what each page is about.

How do I optimise my content?

What you need to ensure is that your keyword phrase is included TWICE in your page content. I’m not talking within any navigational menus. Your keyword phrase needs to appear, uniquely, twice, and on just the one page. Ideally at the start and the end of each portion of page content. Note: This does not include other previously discussed areas in which to house keyword phrases such as the page title tags or the page heading.

Make sure that you have the right keyword phrase

You should have already decided on your keyword phrase that you’re aiming for on the page that you are writing content for. If not, go to the Overture Keyword Selector Tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) and select your phrase that you want to use. Ideally for internal site pages (not the home page) you want to be aiming at keyword phrases that are no popular than around 2000 searches per month.

Start by selecting a word that represents you business genre. For example, if you are in the Print Industry, type ‘Print’ into the Overture Keyword Selector. At the time of writing, there were 63515 searches for the word ‘print’ during the previous month.

Now select a phrase with somewhere between 500 and 2000 search requests per month from the other suggestions below. For this example, I’ve chosen the phrase ‘overnight print’ which has had 1328 searches the previous month.

You then take the phrase ‘overnight print’ and apply in twice in your page content and other important areas in your web page that should contain your keywords. For this example you would probably ensure that the content is about a special ‘overnight print’ service that your company might do.

If you’re a business that specializes in printing, other content pages that you may wish to create that are relevant to both our users and search engines could be based around the following keyword phrases found in the same search:

1) Print to PDF

2) Print Management

3) Digital Camera Print

4) Large Print

5) Print Management Consultancy

The possibilities of finding relevant keyword phrases that you can base content upon for your website aren’t endless. Make sure that you maximise the effectiveness of each one.

Don’t write your content for search engines

However tempting it may be, don’t pull off as many popular search phrases as possible and insert them into your page content that isn’t specifically relevant to those phrases. You’ll turn off your visitors and search engines will catch up with you eventually.

David Bain is founder of the independent business articles resource, http://www.BuildYourOwnBusiness.biz. BuildYourOwnBusiness offers the latest business news & management advice on how best to build your own business - business articles on Strategy, eBusiness, Change Management & much, much more.





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