smart think marketing

A variety of  factors are weighed in search engine ranking.  Because search engines alter their algorithms frequently, there is no “magic bullet” for staying on page one of search engine results. You can however increase your odds of being returned in relevant internet searches if you pay attention to a few things.

Several components are weighed by search engines when it comes to ranking your website.  The age of your website is important.  Brand new sites do not garner the same credibility with search engines as a site that has been seasoned for a year to several years.  Search engines like links, not just outbound links where you feature links to all your vendors and their websites.  They love inbound links. Inbound links means that you are considered a resource for other sites, and this gives you credibility. Especially if the inbound links are coming from well established sites with heavy traffic.

Meta tags are not as important as they used to be.  Why?  Volume. With the sheer number of new websites popping up daily, meta tags have become a secondary or even tertiary in importance.  We also believe we can blame spammers for this one. Why? Because so many spam squeeze pages took over the internet, flooding their pages with meta tags that weren’t relevant to their page content.

How annoying is it to be searching for “beach cottages” and get results for lawn maintenance contracts or male enhancement products?

Because meta tags are controlled by the people setting up websites, they have become a much less reliable source, though not completely irrelevant.

Content is still hugely important to search engine optimization. When writing copy for your website you should become familiar with the terms Keyword Frequency, and Keyword Density.

Keyword Frequency is the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a given web page. Theoretically, the more times a keyword or phrase appears within a web page, the more relevance a search engine will give the page for a search of those particular keywords.

Keyword density is the ratio (percentage) of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words on a particular web page.  Search engine preferred Keyword Density Ratios vary by search engine.  It’s recommended to aim for a Keyword Density Ratio of 3-7%.

How do you determine keyword density?

Keyword Density = Keyword Count x 100, Divided by Total Word Count

Take a 500 word article about TVs, optimizing for the keyword “TV”
Total Word Count: 500
Keyword used: 12
“TV” density = (12×100)/500
Keyword density for “TV” = 2.4%

Use Keywords in Your Headers

It’s a good idea to break up long text blocks with headers or headlines. Keywords should be used in your headers/headlines and page tags. Write your content for your target customer. Incredibly most websites are actually written at a college level. Keep your content written for a sixth grade reading level whenever possible.

Keep your content fresh, and updated. In addition to tweaking your content, consider adding a blog to your website if you haven’t already.  Think of the search engine spiders that are crawling the internet, looking for new data, or food. Feed the spiders. Give them fresh new content, entice them to come back and crawl your site.

When you blog, most blogging platforms like WordPress provide you an SEO component that allows you to manually tag and keyword optimize your posts. Do your keyword research before writing your blog content, and write with keyword optimization strategy in mind.  Do the same when submitting your keywords and tags on your blog posts.

Several blogging platforms will also ping your new content automatically. Sending a ping is like raising your hand in class and telling the teacher to call on you. It’s like giving Google a little nudge, saying “look over here, I’ve got something for you.” You can also utilize free pinging services such as PingoMatic or PingOat.

These basic SEO strategies are a primer for more in-depth SEO practices. In the future we’ll look at more in-depth strategies for driving traffic to your website.