2012 has begun with me refreshing my corporate website, starting this blog, launching a new site for social media marketing [social clics] as well as creating facebook and other social media pages. In this process, I looked at some old articles I wrote in 2009 regarding SEO. First I wanted to see if I knew what I was talking about suggesting I have learned something in the last few years and second to see if any of my writing that day were still relevant today. I was pleasantly surprised when I reviewed the article; http://ezinearticles.com/?Common-Sense-SEO&id=2744419 entitled "Common Sense SEO.
I stressed a common sense approach and using all the various meta tags at your disposal. First, what you can control is your data, your content, and as everybody knows "kontent is king" (sic). You need quantity and quality content. I would define quantity as a minimum of 400 words per keyword. Keywords can be subsets of a larger topic. Quality of your content is having a reasonable number of mentions of the keyword and even phrases containing the keyword. This may include singular and plural versions. Your keywords could be phrases and not just singular words.
After having your main quality page of content on a particular keyword/phrase, you can then focus on more (quantity). Create more pages, that may have subsets or as some people say 'long tail' keywords. You might also think of these pages as a category to sub-category relationship with these new pages. On each page you will want to try and create text links within the content that will link to the page or sub page. This allows the search engines to follow and spider all of your pages.
One of our clients, Paragon Industries, www.ParagonWeb.com manufactures kilns. Therefore our main keyword is kiln. There are sub-pages containing kiln usages and the products themselves. As you would drill down through the site you continue your root keywords and many long tail words and associated terms.
This is the same thought regarding what you might write in a blog or on a social media page. Define a keyword or topic, create your quality content. Quality content is search engine optimized. in itself. SEO does not mean using the same keyword in every sentence to where reading the page is like a first grade paper, because if a search engine or other advertisement has gotten a user to your site, a page with 100 instances of your keyword will turn them off in a heartbeat. Thus you content will need to be readable, compelling and encouraging to make the user perform a task that you want them to do; that call to action in advertising and marketing venacular.
Don't: Spot is a dog. Spot is my dog. Spot is a big dog. Spot is a male dog. Spot is four years old. Spot likes to chase squirrels. Spot likes to go to the park. Spot takes long naps. This is a picture of spot.
Do: Spot is my four year old male dog. He likes to go to the park and chase squirrels. Do you like this picture of Spot taking a long nap after we come back from the park?
While this example is pretty rudimentary; the proper text is not spammy and even has a call to action. So get into the proper mindset when you begin creating your content.
Finally, for each page, you want to make sure that it can stand on its own meaning that it has a topic or keyword and the content relates in quality to that specific keyword wherever if falls in the scheme of things for this keyword. Adhere to this principal throughout your website and you will have created the best SEO that your site can have. It will accomplish the two things that your content should do; get visitors and then get them do to something you want. How do you make sure your content is search engine optimized?
Robert
