Part 4: Keywords and Content
Helping Them Find Your Website Of Dreams
In the movie “Field of Dreams”, Roy, the passionate farm owner, followed a voice in his head telling him to “Build it and they will come.”
With nothing more than spirit and faith in the unknown, Roy cuts down his profit generating crop to build a baseball field. In the end, the magical diamond becomes a recreational retreat for baseball players of yesteryear as they come back from Heaven to enjoy, once again, the game that was their lifelong passion.
Though he sacrificed his farm and nearly lost everything he owned to follow a dream of building the field, Roy made out in the end. People from all over the land fled to the magical diamond in Iowa for reasons they could not even explain. They paid to watch the former greats lace up the cleats and play America’s Pastime.
It worked out for Roy.
But far too often, companies invest time, money and resources into building a website hoping that they do it right and people will come - only to be disappointed when they don’t.
To do it right the first time, follow these three tips on preparing your website for the search engine process and people from all over the land just may be landing at your website of dreams.
1. Start with a good page title and website description: Search engines look for key components of your website when making a decision IF to include your site and WHERE to include your site. With your page title, be short and to the point (one sentence). Do not put words like “Best” or “Number One”. Think of this as your street side awning. You want people to know quickly what they are looking at. Your description should expand off your title and have more detailed information. Again, make this a sentence and not a bunch of words strung together. This is the guts of your classification and you want to be clear, concise and detailed.
2. Keywords: When people are searching for websites to fit a specific need, they type in keywords. Keywords could be as simple as one word or they can be a very specific phrase. To be most effective, rely on your planning and purpose statement to be your foundation for keywords. Think like the customer and put in sentences people might actually type into a search engine and use these as your keywords. This exercise is a lot like the Yellow Pages. If you own a candle shop in Maine, you want your keywords to be about candles and the accessories and services you offer. Just as it wouldn’t make sense for your candle shop to be listed under “Accountants” in the yellow pages, creating keywords that do not match your website’s purpose is just as ineffective.
3. Content: Just as important as letting people know who you are and what you do is having relevant content within your website pages. This includes what you say as well as tags and links.
a. When writing your website content, be sure to put the most relevant information in the first paragraph of your pages. Search engines will typically focus more on the top of the page than the bottom when classifying and inspecting.
b. Your buttons and images should have “Alt Tags” or text options assigned to them. This serves two purposes: (1)search engines do not see images and the more labels you have on graphics, the more likely your website will get approved by websites; (2)having labels on pictures and buttons allows users whose graphics are not on and those who are using voice activated machines to see your page without seeing the graphics and pictures.
c. Make sure your pages are linked properly from within and out. Broken links within your own site as well as well as broken links to other websites will hurt your ranking and respectability in the search engines.
Power tips for good keyword development:
1. Develop your keywords as you would develop your business. For instance, if someone were to ask you “Do you offer Christmas Candles?” and your answer is YES! Then put Christmas Candles into your keywords. You’ll also want to arrange the phrase a couple of ways to cover your bases. For example: Christmas Candles, Candles for Christmas, Special Candles for Christmas, Special Candles for Christmas, Christmas Theme Candles, etc. You never know what phrase your next customer may type into the search engine.
2. Be specific and be efficient: For your keywords to work best, they must be aimed at the right area of search terms. If your business has geographical restrictions, be mindful of those restrictions in your search terms. For instance, if you are a plumber and live in Bangor, Maine you’re not going to be able to service a customer in Oklahoma. So, while it’s ok to have simply “plumbing” or “professional plumber” in your keywords, you’ll get better results by also combining “plumbers in bangor, maine” and “bangor maine plumbers” or “plumbers in maine”, etc. Again, be aware of what your customers would type into a search engine and use these terms to help build your keyword library.
Following these simple but very important steps will prepare your website to be most effective in search engine classifications and increase your rankings and your traffic.
[“You Want A Website” is one of 6 in the Website Success Program, authored by Cary Weston, principal of Sutherland Weston, Marketing Communications. For more information on this series as well as marketing and media services offered by Sutherland Weston, Inc. visit www.sutherlandweston.com or contact Cary Weston by email: info@sutherlandweston.com]