Three Steps To Powerful, Easy And Free SEO For Your Web Site
Copyright 2006 Angela Booth
If you’re not optimizing your Web pages for the search
engines, you’re not only missing out on a lot of traffic,
but chances are that it’s costing you money, especially if
you rely solely on Pay Per Click advertising to get traffic
to your site.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is easy, and if you do it
yourself, it’s free: it just takes a little time, and a
strategy.
If you follow the process outlined in this article, within
a few weeks you’ll be getting a flow of free traffic to
your Web pages. What’s more, the people who arrive on your
site’s pages will be targeted visitors, primed to buy from
you, because you have just what they’re looking for.
While the usual SEO process is well known, the process
outlined in this article is different, because it focuses
on creating landing pages — destination pages — as entry
points to your Web site.
Let’s look at the process.
Step 1: Discover who’s looking for you
Start by thinking about your customers. Who’s looking for
you, and what terms would they type into a search engine
query box to find you? The terms that they’d type into the
search engines are your site’s pages keywords and key
phrases. Make a list of these keywords. If your site has
been online for a few months, scan your referrer logs to
see what keywords your visitors used. Because the search
engines are basically just indexing software, your keywords
are the keys to the SEO kingdom.
You’ll use your lists of keywords and phrases as you
optimize all your Web pages.
Use the keywords in: your page titles, your page
descriptions, your meta tags, and of course in the content
on the pages themselves. You should also use your keywords
in internal links across your Web site. It’s wise to get
other site owners to link to you using the keywords for
which you want to be found too. This tells the search
engines exactly what your pages are about, and when the
pages should be returned in the query results.
Optimize every page on your site with keywords which are
specific to your site, as well as to each individual page.
Aim to create around 300 to 800 words on each page.
Although you won’t manage lots of content for every page —
some pages don’t need it — the more text you can get onto
your pages which includes your keywords the better.
Yes, this takes time, especially if you have a large site.
However, it’s time that will repay you over and over in the
months and years to come, in FREE Web traffic.
In your optimization process, your individual pages are
all-important: especially your site’s landing pages.
Step 2: Create landing pages that sell
The strategy to optimize your Web site to get traffic and
to make sales is to optimize each page, as well as to
create specific “landing pages” for your site. This is
because your pages get to the top of the search engine
results pages, known as the SERPs, your sites don’t. (The
SERPs are the search engine pages which are returned when
people enter search queries into the search engines’ query
fields.)
Step 3: Realize that landing page content is the emperor
You’ll often hear that “content is king”. However, this
needs to be amended to “content is king, but landing page
content is the emperor”.
Landing pages are sometimes called “Web sales pages”. Often
they’re developed as the landing point, so to speak, for
PPC advertising. These pages usually have a lot of content,
which makes them magnetic to the search engines.
Think of your landing pages as entry points, or destination
pages, for your site. You want your landing pages to stand
out — they’re the most important pages on your site.
Because they are so important, you’ll want to create many
landing pages for your site: these will be special pages
that you create specifically for keywords for which you
want to be discovered in the search engines. Consider
creating a landing (sales) page with unique,
information-rich content for each product and service that
you sell.
Over time, your special landing pages will draw an
ever-increasing flow of targeted traffic to your site. So
in three steps, you’ve created powerful search engine
optimization for your site.
About the Author:
Angela Booth is a veteran copywriter and marketer. She
develops SEO marketing strategies for businesses large and
small. Visit her creative copywriting site at
http://angelabooth.com/ and her Creativity Factory
marketing copywriting blog at
http://www.angelabooth.com/wp/ for more information on
search engine optimization and marketing. You can hire
Angela for all your SEO copywriting and marketing needs.