Tactical Execution

We’ve all heard the phrase Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  We’re all familiar with the need to optimize our websites for the keyword phrases that are central to our businesses.  But how many of us truly know how to go about it?  How many people really know all the different places we can load keywords?  I’ve discussed this before in a post about the primary SEO success factors.  Well, here are a few more pointers.

Create pages for each keyword phrase.

This is a basic one, but one that is often overlooked.  Let’s say you’re trying to promote your business in Walnut Creek (the city Tactical Execution is based in).  You obviously want your website to rank high for people putting “Walnut Creek” into their search querie.  The first thing you should do is create a page called “Walnut Creek” or better yet “Walnut Creek [business keyword phrase]“.  By doing so, you’ll create a new URL on your website that includes both your city name and your primary business keyword phrase, side by side.

Search engines put a lot of weight on the words included in your URLs.  Check out All American Hauling.  I built this site for a friend and you’ll notice I’ve created individual pages for each city they service and every service they offer.  In addition, I’ve included links to all these individual pages right on the homepage.  Not only does that include all the relevant keywords on the homepage but it also adds keyword-rich URLs pointing to keyword-rich descriptive pages.

Put keywords into image tags.

Every image on your website has a “Title” tag and an “Alt” tag.  Those tags all represent places where you can include more descriptive keywords.  Again, you can look at All American Hauling for an example of this.  It’s a very basic site but the mechanics are very strong and it has a #1 Google ranking for keyword phrases including “hauling Walnut Creek”, “garbage removal Walnut Creek”, “East Bay garbage removal”, “Contra Costa garbage removal” and “Clayton garbage removal”.

Every image on this site has keyword-rich tags.  The search engines know the “Alt” tag shows when someone scrolls over an image.  That means the words you put there are almost always relevant to the topic of the page.  Take advantage of that and put your targeted keywords into your image tags.

Use keyword-rich anchor text.

The words you use for your links play a major role in the ranking of the destination pages.  Again, we can take All American Hauling as a case study.  All the services that All American Hauling offers are described on individual pages.  Those services are also listed on the homepage and each one is a link to the associated page.

The alternative to this approach is to references “the services offered by All American Hauling” and then put the link on “services”.  There’s no value in that.  “Services” says absolutely nothing about what the company does.  Take advantage of the opportunity in your internal link structure.  By putting the links onto your targeted keywords, you increase their importance within your entire site.

These are just three small tips and there are many others.  Get creative when optimizing a website.  Think about all the possible places where you can include more keywords.  If you leverage all the SEO opportunities, you can create an extremely effective website.  The All American Hauling website only has 34 pages but it delivers organic visitors all day long and you can do it too!

Search engines like Google look at a variety of different factors when evaluating your website.  Although the specifics of these algorithyms are difficult to nail down, the major factors include the following:

1. The amount of unique relevant content on your site.
2. The newness or freshness of the content on your site.
3. The number of inbound links pointing to your site.
4. The number of links to the sites that are linking to you.

These 4 factors are the primary contributors to a strong search engine ranking, but there are others as well.  One under-utilized contributor is anchor text.  And what’s that?  Well, it’s the words used as the ‘anchor’ for a link.  So, if I used the words free articles to click to the 70+ free articles on this website, the anchor text for the link is “free articles”.

Let’s think about this.  By using the words “free articles”, I am saying that the place to find free articles is the location the link points to.  Or if I used sports news to link to ESPN.com, I am saying the best place on the internet for sports news is ESPN.com.  I am defining my endorsement.  Any link I put into my blog or website is an endorsement for the website I’m pointing to.  And when I put the link on certain words, I’m adding clarification to my endorsement.  The search engines know that.

Turns out, the words used to link to YOUR website play a significant role in the ranking your website gets for those specific words.  We all have specific keyword phrases that we’d love to ranking high for on the search engines.  For me, I’d love to rank high for phrases like “internet marketing”, “small business marketing” and “entrepreneur resources” among others.  And article marketing is one of the easiest ways to create those inbound links all by yourself.

Article marketing is the process of writing 500+ word articles (demonstrating your expertise) and then publishing them on the internet.  There are dozens of article distribution services that will distribute your article to hundreds or even thousands of article directories and online publishers for cheap or even free.  The beauty is that you can talk about yourself in an area called the author resource box and in that area, you can include a link to your website.

Most article authors go through the process and put the link on the name of their website address.  So for me, the link would be put on Tactical Execution.  That’s a major missed opportunity!  Instead, these authors should select one of their ideal keyword phrases and put the link on those words.  For me, I could put the link on a phrase like small business marketing.  By doing so, I am creating an inbound link to my website with the anchor text directly aligned with my marketing objectives.

As you may know, the hallmark of my business success is that I test everything I preach.  And in that effort, I did an experiment in the fall of 2007 where I targeted the phrase “growth marketing” and published a number of articles with the inbound link anchored on that phrase.  Within just 17 days, I already had my Tactical Execution listed on page 2 of a Google search for that phrase.  And today, my site usually comes up first or second.  You can see where I come up today by clicking here.

The primary strength of article marketing is the ability to target specific keyword phrases by using them as the anchor text for your link in your author resource box.  Personally, I use iSnare to distribute my articles and today, they show up on literally thousands of different websites.  Best of all, the service only costs me about $1 per article.  Take advantage of the opportunity and start targeting specific keyword phrases today.

This is what everybody always asks me.  Well, it’s a process.  It’s a series of things you need to do on a regular basis and the most important part is to produce more and more relevant content on a regular basis.  That’s the first question I ask clients.  Do you have a content generation mechanism?  If you don’t, we have a problem.  If you do, the sky’s the limit.

The problem is that most people want to buy results, not a process.  They don’t want to do anything.  They just want it to happen.  I hate to say it but that just won’t work.  You see, the evolving blogosphere is full of intelligent people generating fresh new relevant unique content on a daily basis.  These blogs have hundreds or even thousands of pages, all about one particular topic.  How can a well-optimized but static website compete?  It can’t.

Having said that, let’s spend a little time talking about the primary SEO factors that do, in fact, help your cause.  Again, keep in mind that a static website with no new fresh content will almost certainly come in second place.  But the following tips will definitely put you in a better position to show up high on a Google search.  And if you do these things AND produce fresh relevant content, you’re in great shape to rise to the top for dozens or even hundreds of relevant keywords and phrases.

Keywords in Title Tags.

This is one of the most important things you can do.  Every page has a title tag and you should limit it to about 65 characters.  Make sure you put a title tag on every page and stack it full of relevant keywords.

Keywords in H1 Tags.

Your H1 tag is the title of your page.  It’s what comes up at the very top.  The search engines look at the words in your title as an indication of what your page is about.  So … get those keywords in there!

Keywords in the Text Copy

If you have a particular keyword or keyword phrase in your title tag and in your H1 tag, make sure you put it into your copy as well.  Keep in mind that Google likes sentences and paragraphs.  So write your content in that format and include the same keywords throughout your copy.

Keywords in Your URLs.

The nice thing about most modern websites is that the title of your page becomes part of the permalink for that post.  That’s good news because it puts the same keywords into the actual URL for that page.  Whenever possible, include keywords into the URL because it’ll help your cause from an SEO perspective.

Keywords in Your Domain.

Yes, it matters.  If Google finds the same string of characters in your search query and the domain for your website, it will give you some additional credit for it.  So if someone searches for “health insurance” and your domain name is health-insurance.com, you’ll benefit as a result.

Last but not least, pick a narrow topic and focus on that.  Don’t try to go too wide.  Pick 3 or 4 keyword phrases and focus your entire website around that.  It will make it easier for Google to understand what your website is all about and present it when people search for that topic.

I’ll finish with the same thing as I started with.  The most important thing is to produce new fresh content on a regular basis.  Google likes fresh content.  And – surprise, surprise – blogs are the best way to do it.  If you want to make a splash on today’s internet, I highly recommend putting a blog together and start feeding it with regular content additions.