In an earlier post (Seven Simple SEO Tricks Anyone Can Do), I mentioned that Search Engine Positioning includes both technical and non-technical aspects. The non-technical aspects can also be broken down into two distinct categories:
- content aspects, and
- promotion aspects.
This post is all about the content – and what I’m doing to try to ensure my blog earns its place in Google search results. That means I’m focusing on Keywords. (Check out Site Promotion Plan Part Two: SEO to learn how Keywords impact search results) .
First, I’m trying to choose good keywords. I can’t stress enough how important this is (and I’ll admit it’s something that I could do lots better myself). If you’re starting out in a crowded market, keyword selection is vital to your site appearing high in a Google search. When should you do it? Before you’ve written anything. Have your Keywords all planned out in advance, and write accordingly. Otherwise, you may well be wasting your time.
You have to choose keywords that are actively searched, and that don’t have a lot of competition. How?
There are two tools that are of immeasurable help:
- Google’s Keyword tool
- Google’s PageRank tool:
Google’s Keyword tool is a keyword generator. What I did was type in the general terms I was interested in writing on. These included Web Content, Search Engine Optimisation, Web marketing and the like. I hit “Get Keyword Ideas” and noted the keywords taht returned the highest number of monthly searches.
If it was as simple as that, everyone would be first in the rankings. Unfortunately, that’s only the start. For the most popular keywords that came up, I did a Google search and looked at the top four or five sites. I’ve got the PageRank tool in my toolbar (you can get it by downloading either the Google Toolbar or the SEOBOOK toolbar; I use the latter, because it gives me a bunch of other useful things as well).
What this means is that I can see the PageRank of any page on my screen. If the top four or five sites from my Google search showed a relatively low PageRank (zero or one), then I figured I could compete fairly well. If they showed a higher PageRank (two or three), then I figured I might have to work a bit harder. Anything higher than three, for my blog site, went straight in the Too Hard basket.
Once I had my keywords, I started writing posts that included those keywords in important places. These places inlcude:
- the page heading
- alt text behind images (even though I have very few of these so far)
- link text (see how often I link back to previous posts?), and
- high in the page text.
You can probably tell by looking at my posts some of the keywords I’m targeting.
Each placement is important, but it’s the combination of placements that can really gain Google’s attention. Hopefully, in time to come, whenever anyone types my keywords into Google’s Search field, my posts will end up fairly close to the top – and passing strangers will click on them to get a better look.
Not Just Search Engines
There’s one more thing that I consider to be vitally important. I’m not just writing for search engines. I’m also writing for real people. For me, this has a number of implications. I’m trying to keep my posts as useful as possible. For example, this entire section was conceived as a detailed “how-to” for those just getting started.
The idea isn’t to just offer general comments, but to provide detailed information about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it that way. I’m doing all I can to ensure that it’s both readable and interesting. Why? Because I want people to come back. I want them to bookmark my site and check regularly, just to see what else I might have written.
I also want them to start sharing my posts on social bookmarking sites. They’re only going to do that if what I’ve written is useful.
My next post will be on another non-technical aspect of Search Engine Positioning: Site promotion. For me, that’s one of the most interesting parts of the whole game.
