A Simple Way to Boost Search Engine Rankings
The other day a friend was asking some simple ways to bring traffic to his site. The first thing I recommended was starting a blog. Nothing special. Just start blogging about your topic, combined with a few tricks…and you’ll see traffic increase in no time.
Easy said then done right? Not really.
Of course the blog has to have a purpose behind it – otherwise you will be receiving pointless and un-targeted search engine traffic, but some traffic is better than none.
Anyhow, I want to share the e-mail I wrote to him. These may be concepts you are familiar with. If so, pass them along. If not, sit back and enjoy.
In terms of driving more traffic:
# 1 – I would start out by getting more familiar with the Google Keyword Tool. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This shows you the volume of searches on a monthly and historic basis for a given keyword. For instance, the term “appraisals” searched over 500k / month…then, narrowing it down to “online appraisals” is searched 14k / month.
As people are using search engines more and more like Q & A engines…i.e, “How much does it cost for an appraisal”? This allows you to structure your content based on what the consumer is asking and looking for.
It’s a concept commonly referred to as the Long Tail of Search – a long tail keyword is any phrase 3 words or more.
Even though your Long Tail Keywords get less searches – if you structure your content around those phrases, you will not only be competing with less websites, but your content will be more specific and target to more controlled niche.
Going back to my previous example, if you do a Google query for “appraisals” , 9,320,000 results are displayed. However, conducting another search for “how much do online apraisals cost?” yields only 5,080,000 results…further refining your competition. And notice one thing: the sites at the top do not have “How much do online appraisals cost?” as their headline – so creating a blog post with this phrase as your title will put you (maybe not instantly) in the running for the top spot.
# 2 – Another concept to keep in mind is Keyword Density….most SEO’s (Search Engine Optimizers) recommend a keyword density of 2-5% without risking the integrity of the content. Defintion: make sure the targeted keywords make up between 2-5% of overall content.
When search engines see this, they view it has a relevant article to the queried phrase.
Always remember, search engines rank pages not websites. Each page must target a specific keyword. Even though they will be picked up for random phrases – you can make each page more appealing for each term.
There’s more I’ll go into later, but I want to make sure we’re on the same page so far….
Your thoughts?
