Bright Ideas # 58 – Satisfying the Spiders: Part V of Why Writing for the Web is Different 

Today, as part of my ongoing series on writing for the Web, I want to share with you a rarely talked about Website secret…

You can improve your search engine ranking just by improving your written content!

A lot of people think there are just three main ways to get listed higher in search engine results: Pay-per-click, links, or a professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign.

Sure, all these methods can certainly work when done right. But when done wrong, they can cost you a truckload of money with little or no results. So if those are the only methods you’re focused on, you are missing the boat.

Because nothing beats the feeling of having someone call you, ready to buy, after they found—and loved—your site (sure beats cold-calling by about a mile…)!

But first they have to find it. And that means showing up in the search engine results when someone looks for what you do or sell (not just when you type in your name or your businesses name).

Because the real goal of SEO is to have someone who’s never heard of you or your business to find you on the Web.

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What’s the connection between your content and your search engine rankings?
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Think of it like this…

A search engine like Google has a job to do. That job is to take whatever search terms (or keywords) you type in, go through its database of Websites, and provide you with the most relevant search results possible.

Because if you don’t get relevant results when you use a certain search engine, after a few tries you’ll stop using that one.

So, how do search engines know which sites are going to be most relevant to your search? By looking at the content on the sites!

You see, search engines have these little programs called spiders that crawl around the Web finding and indexing sites. And whenever a new site is submitted, the spiders go check it out.

What are Web spiders looking for? It’s not bugs. Nope. These spiders “eat” words. In fact, they can’t see graphics at all.

Spiders want to find written information on your site that tells them what you do or sell. In particular, they are looking for your keywords.

So if you sell hummingbird feeders, you’d want to have those words on your site. And you’d want to use them in the specific locations that tell the spiders “This is what my site is all about”. Without the right content, the spiders can’t tell what you sell.

But, you can’t just use any old keywords. Because if a million other sites use the same ones, you still won’t show up very high in the search engines.

And it doesn’t help if your site is buried on page 200, or even page 20, of the search engine results. Because most folks will have found what they needed long before they come across your site.

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Anatomy of a Good Keyword
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Good keywords have three things in common:

• They are an accurate description of what you offer
• They are popular search terms
• They don’t have too much competition

Take the keyword ‘cars’ for example. Millions of people search for things related to cars everyday.

But if you type ‘cars’ into any search engine, you get back more than a million results. That’s a lot of competition.

If you say you sell ‘antique kit cars’ you cut your competition in half. ‘Cobra kit cars’ cuts the competition down to 250,000 results.

That’s reasonable. So you could add this phrase to your list of possibilities. But don’t stop there.

Ideally, you want a handful of good keyword phrases for at least your home page, if not each of the main pages on your site.

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Keying In on the Right Keywords
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If you already have a site, look at your analytics to find the most common search words visitors are using to find you.

Ask customers, or even friends and family.

Use the Yahoo Search Marketing tools

See what high-ranking competitors use by checking their keyword METATAG (right click on a Website and choose ‘view source’. The META keywords will be near the top of the page).

Once you have a list of possible keyword phrases, check their popularity. Because if only two people per day search using those terms, they won’t do you much good.

Software like Good Keywords, or Websites like Wordtracker, makes analyzing the popularity of your phrases easy.

Once you find a few that are popular but don’t have too much competition, you’re ready for the next step—adding keywords to your copy. Which I’ll explain next week…

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Do you have a marketing, advertising or writing question you’d like to have answered? Email me and you might see the answer in a future edition of Bright Ideas.

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