John Brandon | Inc
Is your website living in a dark corner of the Web? That’s no place for a fledgling start-up, let alone a company that has already proved its merit in the marketplace. Languishing on the fringes of the Internet means customers are not finding your site, and they are not finding your products and services.
Adding metatag keywords is no longer enough to draw Web visitors. What follows are tips designed to produce real results. My recommendation? Go through them one by one with your Web programmer and make sure you have hit them all. Then, track the before and after. Post in comments if you see real results.
1. Stuff your keywords naturally.
Experts in search engine optimization say an important step is to load the beginning of an article with keywords. Joel Gross, the founder and CEO of Coalition Technologies, a Los Angeles- and Seattle-based Web design and marketing firm, says you should load keywords naturally, not in any repeating and obvious pattern. If you’re writing about the iPhone, make sure you mention the device up front–don’t bury the topic. Repeat these same natural language keywords in the tags.
2. Fix your content and let it age.
Content is king, says Leslie Handmaker, the SEO program manager for Next Day Flyers. The trick is to make sure your content matches what the search engines expect–articles should be at least 400-500 words. The smartest crawlers can detect where the content is rich in quality or parse out the repetitive, fake stuff. Handmaker says it is also important to let the content sit and age for a while–edits and tweaks mean the crawler has to start over.
3. Claim your Google authorship.
Once you have started generating some fresh content, your next step is to make sure you have claimed your Google authorship. This is a feature in Google+ where you can link your profile on that social network to the content you produce on your site, making it easier for people to find it. Go here to do it: https://plus.google.com/authorship
4. Write linkable content.
One of the great secrets to making sure people find your site is to encourage linking. The more people link to your site, the more people will find it. SEO expert Ben Nesvig says the best way to encourage linking is to write something compelling. Cover an important topic, write about a myth or misunderstanding, add to the social debate. People link to what they like.
