Writing good quality content is the best way to improve your site for the search engines, and to attract inbound links and targeted visitors to your site. In this chapter we will learn:
- How can you improve the ranking of your web site in the search engine result pages
- How can you write articles that will really get you the visitors you want
First of all, Google and other search engines will index your articles and look for relevance of the search term used in their site in the content of your article. One of the things they will scan and index your articles for is the keywords, or search words, which are used by the searcher. The searcher is, of course, your potential visitor and you want that visitor to get to your web site. This means you should give that visitor a reason to visit your site right there on the search result page. Later in this chapter we will look at the titles and meta tags. , and you will learn about the options you should set to display the right kind of information to your prospective visitors.
When it comes to keywords, you have to go back to your keywords list and look at the keywords that are being frequently searched for. You have to use words from the list you created in Chapter 1. Those words will bring you the most relevant traffic, and you should write your articles around them. By now, you probably know these keywords better than your potential visitor and you also know the combination of words that he/she is most likely to search for.
In the keyword list that you have composed, there should be some real gold nuggets that you can use. The best choices are the ones with a lot of searches and low competition.
Looking at the keywords you have selected, it is time to choose the topic of your article. The topic must specify the problem you are going to solve and how you can solve it. One thing you must remember when you write the article is that the searcher is looking for either:
- A solution for his/her problem
- A way to learn more about the topic of his/her interest
- Some information on a service or product
- A place to buy a specific product or service.
One or more of these interests of your potential visitor needs to be covered by the topic of your article.
Depending on the interest of your intended visitor, you will have to use different keywords to target them. These keywords should be reflected in the content of the article and the content of the article should help your visitors to reach their goal.
For example, if they want information about "digital photography", you need to have those two keywords in place. If he/she is having a problem with photographs, you should include keywords such as "How to solve the problem with your digital photos". This way you will have included the basic keywords digital, photo, solve, and problem. The "How to" part is to tell the visitor that he/she is going to find the answer to the problem on your site.
If the visitor wants to buy a digital camera, he/she will look for specifications, reviews, and price information. In that case you can include keywords such as the brand, the type of camera, review, comparison, and technical data. You could also have a header stating: "Is the new Sony A350 worth it's price, read our review, and compare the specifications."
You should do a search on Google or Yahoo! and check how the keywords of your search result are displayed. This simple exercise can help to get more insight on where your keywords will show on the results pages. I searched for landscape gardening in order to show you what to look for. You should do the same for your topic and the keywords of your site so that you can see how your competition is doing.
In the following screenshot you see the results of a Google search for landscape gardening. The main thing that stands out is the fact that the keywords you searched for are shown in bold. One other thing that is also obvious is that the search keywords are in the title, in the snippet, and if possible in the URL of the page as well.
Looking at the following screenshot, you will notice that Yahoo! also shows the keywords in bold, but it puts more weight on the URL than on the snippet. For Yahoo! it seems that the title and the URL are the most important factors.
What we see on both the search engines is that your keywords need to be in:
- The HTML title—the title index of the search engines
- The snippet—most likely to be the meta tag description
- The URL of the page
I will show you some other places that you can use to build the relevance of your keyword in the page, but those are not directly shown in the results. They play a big role in getting higher positions in the search results. Here the key to be remembered is the relevance part.
