Search Engine Optimized Website Content

Since search engines are crawling (reading) your website to see if you are a match for the consumer’s ‘computer parts’ search, it’s good SEO practice to use these words throughout the copy of your site.

Keyword rich website copy attracts the attention of search engines and is one of many factors that can help improve your chances of getting in front of potential customers.

Having important keywords in your website’s copy is the first step in optimizing the content of your website. How many times that word appears is the second. Too little won’t do you any good but too much will flag search engines that you are trying to scam the system by stuffing keywords everywhere on your site, regardless of whether or not it makes sense.

How Long Should Content Be?

Content is King in the world of Search Engine Optimization. A home page should have around 300 words of copy, give or take. Try to naturally infuse two keywords into each paragraph. Space them far enough apart so that your copy doesn’t sound repetitive or forced.

Break up long copy by adding a bold headline in between the first set of paragraphs and the last. The headline can be a short description of what the reader will learn by reading the following paragraphs. Search engines also like text that is ‘bolded’. Your website designer may also want to code this headline with an ‘H2’ tag. This is a tag that says to search engines ‘these words are related to the subject of my website.’ Knowing that, use your important keywords in this headline.

The easiest way to write keyword rich copy is to first write about your company from the heart. Forget about which keywords you need to incorporate. After you are satisfied with your copy, go back and see where you can appropriately add in or replace certain terms with you targeted keywords.

Time to get started!

“I exist, therefore I am.”  Not in the eyes of Google, Yahoo, or Bing.  You’ve got a website, but they don’t know you exist, therefore you are NOT.  There are several strategies you need to execute in order to let the search engines know that 1) your website exists and 2) what your website is all about.

Starting with the simplest of SEO tasks to tackle, updating your Meta Data is an important and effective strategy to implement.

What is Meta Data?

Simply put, meta data is information for search engines that describes and categorizes a website.  Meta data can help get your website found online by end-users searching for your product or service.

Meta data has three different categories: meta title, meta description and meta keywords.

The meta data for your website tells search engines what your website is about.  If your website exists to sell computer hardware, using that key phrase and others in your meta data will help search engines understand your site better.  The better they understand what your site is about, the more likely they are to give your website prominent visibility to someone who is searching ‘computer hardware’.

Search engines determine what your website is about, in part, based on your meta data.  Using that information, they decide whether or not your website would be a good match for a user searching for ‘computer hardware’.

If you leave your meta title as the name of your business (example: ABC Technologies), search engines may not understand that your website offers computer hardware.  This means that when someone is searching ‘computer hardware’, your website will most likely never appear.

Your webmaster or site designer can help you update your meta data with important keywords that relate to your business and match what users might be searching for.

How Can You Tell What Your Meta Title Is Right Now?

Pull up your website online. At the very top of your screen, above where you typed in your website address, is your meta title.  Check to see if it uses important phrases that related to your business. Phrases that you could safely assume consumers would be searching for online if they were looking for your product or service.

If your meta data isn’t telling the search engines what your website is all about, who or what is?

Call-To-Actions

Call-to-actions or CTAs are located in various spots on the page that are calling on your visitors to take action and fill out some information. Lame definition but the name pretty sums it up.  Most CTAs are a transaction of information. For example, I have written a wonderful e-book but in order for you to download it, I need a name, email address, and some other stuff in return. Pretty straight forward.

Next Level of CTAs

The process works, but the 2-5% conversion rate doesn’t cut it for me.  I don’t have a statistic for the number of people that become clients from that number but I’m sure its very similar.  Is there a different way to use CTAs? Instead of a transaction of information, it needs to be a connection of people.  Network. So instead of offering a e-book, offer some time on Skype to talk or start a Hangout at Google+. The value of conversation will do more for your business than sending a link to your e-book.

How do you improve your CTAs? What can you do different?

The Design:

They rock a simple two-column layout and color scene that represents wisdom. They do a great job displaying what they do best. Awesome, knowledgable content that has to do with web design.  Each one of the images links to the blog post and they include a nice teaser to pull you in.

The Content:

I walk away from the major of their posts feeling and knowing that I have learned something new.  They stick true to their tag line “Useful Information for Web Developers & Designers. Learning is an important part of growing and resources like this help nurture this.

Reader Connection

Six Revisions interacts by displaying great tutorials for web developers and designers.  Tutorials use education and the exchange of ideas to grow relationships with the readers.

Traffic and & SEO

Hopped over to Website Grader by HubSpot so see how I compared to Six Revisions. (This could be ugly…)

Drum roll…..

Copied directly the WebsiteGrader:

A. Traffic Rank: Top 0.01 %

Alexa is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet in a similar way to Nielsen television show ratings.

Alexa rank of 2,024 which is in the top 0.01 % of all websites.

B. Competing Websites

C. Score Summary

The great content they provide is why they have achieved such an awesome.  I have my work cut out for me.

Take some time to analyze someone in your market and see how you compare.

1. Plugins. If you need your WordPress site to function in way that isn’t initially offered right out of the box, just hop over to the plugin directory and start searching.  You will find what you need.
2. Widgets. Drag and drop at its finest. Change an offer on the homepage. Feature a new page. Add a contact form. If something isn’t working out as planned, change it.  You dont have to know code to add a new look to your site.
3. Internal Linking. Awesome feature that simplifies creating internal links. Give your viewers new pathways to read more about your blog or business.
4. Full Screen Editor. Great new feature in WordPress 3.2 that will eliminate that countless distractions and result in getting more done. I started using this feature immediately.
5. Custom Frameworks. Having a solid foundation to built on is extremely important if you want to focus on getting more done on your blog or with your business. Frameworks alleviate the stress of coding and add the assistance of a solid community.

Here are two areas you need to focus on if you want to remove the clutter.

Header/Logo

• Does the header clearly show your logo and display who you are? This is your brand. Its needs to be clear and concise.  Without this nobody knows who you are.

Nav-bar

• The navbar needs to be simple and direct.  Minimize the buttons. Take complete advantage of the dropdown menus, but keep it organize.  One of my favorite examples of a simple, well-organized nav-bar is Best Buy.

How do we remove the clutter? Not as difficult as it may seem.

1. It is important to design the site from the customers perspective.  They don’t know where everything is like you do.  Ask a friend to take it for a test drive and try to break it or get lost within the site.  If a first time user can navigate from start to finish without getting lost, then the clutter has been removed from the navigation.
2. The Nav-bar requires some basic data crunching to decide if its organize properly.  Use analytic’s to see what pages your visitors enter and exit on.  Also keep an eye on the visits by page breakdown.  This shows the most important pages to your visitors. Making the top pages easy to access is a key factor.
3. Use WordPress.  Makes quick adjustments easy. Need help getting started?
4. Do not make the logo so it dominates the valuable screen real estate.  I like to make the max height of a header/logo 160-200px.

I’m here to help you with your digital presences. As technology continues to grow at an exponential it is important that you keep up. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be on the bleeding edge.

NLI blog was created as a resource to reflect and understand the importance of having a solid digital foundation. Everyday we are surrounded by a wealth of good and bad information.  I want you to be able to sit down and think about where you stand in the vast internet frontier.  This is a place to share ideas and walk away thinking you have learned something new.

Now lets innovate.

For the next 31 days, I will be embarking on my own journey with blogging.  I joined a 31 day blogging challenge being run by Ricardo Bueno. Amazing what you find on Twitter when you follow the right community.  If you would like to join me, that be great. Also please provide feedback, because this journey will not be successful unless you can walk away from here saying you have learned something.

Engage.

Interact.

Innovate.

Live.

Learn.

Connect.

First thing that needs to be established is the main base, i.e. your website.  Its main purpose is to supply content and establish a presence in the digital world.  Contains EVERYTHING that is important to your digital presence.

Next focus is getting your content to the population.  Set up your outpost in the various social media worlds.  Get your valuable content out to your audience.

Now that you have gotten your content out there, you need to listen. Use the feedback to rework and perfect your content.  What is the point of having an outpost if your not going to listen?

Think about this strategy and IMPLEMENT IT.

I recently had the great opportunity to interview Todd Youngblood and Todd Schick from Dreamland Interactive (and a few other solid organizations). Our conversation touched different topics revolving around small businesses and their digital presence.

Topics include:

• How a small business can benefit from a website.
• The areas a business should focus on.
• How geographical limitations shouldn’t limit your digital presence.
• How do you drive new visitors? How do you create loyal visitors?

Thank you for taking the time to listen to our conversation. I hope you enjoyed Next Level Innovation’s first radio show.

Interviewees:

Dreamland Interactive:
Dreamland

Todd Schnick:
Todd’s Intrepid Blog
Find Todd S. On Twitter

Todd Youngblood:
Todd’s YPS Group Blog
Find Todd Y. On Twitter