Building An Effective SEO Keyword Strategy

There is a ton of bad and outdated information on the internet regarding search engine optimization. What you don’t know may kill your chances to rank well!

For a small business owner who doesn’t understand SEO separating the proverbial wheat form the chafe can be a daunting task. The truth is there is a plethora of bad information regarding SEO circulating throughout the internet; because of this many sites fall victim to bad SEO designed by people that don’t understand how to properly optimize a web site.

One business owner actually told me that his strategy was that he just copied the key words that his competitors were using. The problem with this technique is that you are assuming that your competitor knows what they are doing. Lets look at a three examples for creating a solid keyword strategy on your blog or website. Meta Keyword Tag

The meta keyword tag is an HTML tag that contains keywords relevant to the web page you are viewing. Contrary to popular belief this tag is not used by Google at all. With that said I do like to to include a few relevant keywords in this tag for a few reasons. The keywords I choose to use and optimize for can be helpful for internal searches done on my site, and just because Google does not use this tag to help determine a page’s relevance or rank does not mean that other search engines follow in their footsteps. Yes there are other search engines beside Google, they just control the space. A good rule of thumb is never use more than 10 – 15 keywords per page, quality trumps quantity.

On the flip side of that coin I know of one company in particular that specializes in selling semi-custom WordPress websites to real estate agents located throughout New England. When I reviewed their website I noticed that they had stuffed the tag on their homepage with 792 different keywords that they feel are relevant to their business. What they don’t realize is that this is known as keyword stuffing which is frowned upon by Google and also violates their guidelines. The reason I bring this up is not to bash a competitor, but I want to point out that one of the services this company provides to their customers is search engine optimization, well not correctly anyway.

Use of Keywords

The first rule of writing a blog is to sound natural and not like a corporate white paper. You will not rank better for repeating your key phrase or word over and over; in fact you may actually hurt your chance to rank well for that term and bore the hell out of the reader.

Be smart, remember you are writing for another human not the search engine. It will also be beneficial to also use synonyms or like terms in your post or page. There is added SEO benefit to incorporate phrases that help support long tail keyword phrases.

So what are long tail keyword phrases?

Long tail keyword phrases are less popular,more specific,less competitive and help identify user intent. For example if I was searching for someone to paint my house and I entered a the word house painter into Google, I would be presented with over 131 million results none of which are relevant to what I am looking for. The word painter is far to general in nature and the results I received would range from graphic design software to portrait painter.

If I entered in the the long tail keyword phrase residential painting companies central ma. guess what I would be presented with, you guessed it residential painting companies that service Central Massachusetts. The objective when selecting keywords and phrases to rank for is to anticipate what a reasonable user that needed your product or service would search for.

Key Words in Page Titles

The keywords you are trying to rank for need to be placed at the beginning of your title. Below is a page title I discovered recently while doing some competitive research for a client. This is an example of a company that spends a lot of money on advertising with very little if any allotted to their web-site or SEO efforts.

1-800 East West Mortgage-Meeting the Mortgage Financing needs of individuals and families in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Main and Florida.

The title page starts with the name of the company, now this might work well for large brands like Pepsi or Ford but for smaller brands I recommend placing a keyword that you want to target at the beginning of your page title. In my opinion it would be beneficial to use a mortgage related terms instead of the company name near the front. The company name should be placed at the end of the title.

The current page title is also too long and should not exceed 60 characters in length including spaces. Anything more and it will be cut off in the search engine results page. If that wasn’t enough it also seems to me that they have included a description of the company services in their title as well. Place a title in the title tag and and save the description for the meta description.

Not to be critical but another mistake that East West made is at least 5 pages on their site have the same page titles. Each page should offer unique content and each page should have a unique title.

A better optimized page title would look something like this:

Best Mortgage Rates Lowest Closing Costs | 1-800 East West Mortgage.

There is no magic bullet or shortcut when it comes to your SEO strategy. If you take the time to do it correctly you will start reaping the rewards of better placement in the result pages. If your interested please check out my posts Google Adwords are a big fat waste of money part 1 and Google Adwords are a big fat waste of money part 2

I look forward to hear your thoughts below and if you have any questions please feel free to ask.