If your website seems to be hiding in plain sight like this young fawn, you’ve got a visibility problem. In this second post of our effective websites series, we’ll continue to look at some common reasons that websites perform poorly, and show you what to do about it.
Your website should be significant to search engines. Do you know why that matters?
At least 80% of all new traffic is the result of a search on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or one of the lesser known search engines. People type in what they’re looking for, and you want those words connected to your website.
Where you rank on the search engine results page (SERP) depends on multiple factors. There are on-site things to consider, as well as off-site. Today’s post deals only with some of the on-site factors.
Do you know what keyword phrases people would use when they’re looking for what you offer?
We use a combination of common sense, local geographic terms (for local businesses), Google Insights for Search, and the Market Samurai keyword research tool (for the heavy lifting).
It’s not enough to simply guess which terms people might be searching for. It’s important to do the research to learn what terms deliver traffic and what terms have too much competition to reasonably pursue.
It’s also important to understand what the competition is up to.
- How is it that they’re ranking first in Google on your preferred search terms?
- What do you need to do to outrank them?
Research can unveil all of this and give you a leg up on your competition.
Are your keyword phrases used in your META tags, including page titles, description, and keywords?
Google isn’t the only game in town. The other search engines still respond to META tags.
The most important on-page locations for your keyword phrases are the unique titles on each page. Now when I say ‘title,’ I’m not referring to the bold text at the top of your page, like your banner. In older browsers, the title was obvious at the top of the screen, above the web page.
Newer tabbed browsers do a pretty good job of hiding the titles, but they still matter to the search engines. Of equal importance, page titles become the clickable link in the SERPs. Unique page titles belong in the header of each page of your website, and won’t necessarily show up on the page itself.
Are your keyword phrases woven into the headlines, body text, hyperlinks, and lists on your web pages?
This weaving of keyword phrases is an art, not to be confused with spamming your poor reader with nonsense – while you think you’re writing for the search engines. Search engines can’t read, they just follow the traffic. Just make sure your keyword phrase is in there a time or two and forget anything you may have heard about keyword density.
Write for your reader, period. Need some help with your website copy?
Next up in this series: Link building
Related Post: Make Your Website Work FOR You – Part 1
Great information! May be very basic to some people but I think it’s always good to be reminded of these common sense rules for the web.
Thanks, Abby. These are, indeed, the old standby’s and they’re still the foundation to build upon.
“Just make sure your keyword phrase is in there a time or two and forget anything you may have heard about keyword density.”
I agree about ignoring all advice on keyword density. I do think it’s a good idea to have your main keyword in the first sentence of your post. It helps the search engines when they are crawling your site.
Don, I agree. Thanks for your comment.
very nice. this is, of course, my end goal as well. having my website working for me, that would be awesome.
Great continuation, i really liked reading these 2 articles …thanks for sharing
Hi Shari,
What’s your view on header tags? Do you think that H1, H2 etc. are important to have on a page?
Thanks.
Hi Katie,
Great question! Yes, it’s important to use header tags appropriately on the page, but it’s far more important to get your page titles right and have lots of relevant links to your page.
This is great information. Thank you so much for sharing with us
All great tips. I have noticed a lot of sites do not title their pages correctly. You should always title each page for what it is for, ie, contact us, useful links etc. Quite a few people forget to do this & they all end up being titled Index or something totally unrelated.
You make a very good point that keywords should be included in headings as well as into the body copy of each page. Try to write for the user but don’t forget the purpose of your writing. Thanks for the great posts.