SEARCH ENGINES

Why write for the search engines?

Because a high ranking will draw more traffic to your site, which leads to more sales!

To successfully rank highly in the search engines, the words on your Web pages should never be an afterthought but a major investment in your search engine optimization campaign.

The first thing your should do is to identify who you want to come visit your site and think of what they may search for to try and find you. This involves putting yourself in the place of your customer and trying to figure out what they may do when searching for your product. In the case for real estate agents, obviously homes, realtors, and whatever area you are servicing are important terms.

After your keyword research, writing search-engine-friendly copy should be the very next step in your optimization campaign. For non-competitive keyword phrases (phrases that not many other people are targeting on their sites), the writing on the page alone can often bring in high rankings without any other special coding and Meta tagging.

For competitive terms and phrases, a little more effort needs to be employed. There are six main areas where you need to focus your attention.

• The META title of the page (very important)
• The META terms
• The META description
• The Alt tags on any photos on the site
• The keyword density of the page text
• The keyword placement within the page text

The title of the page should reflect the major search term or phrase you are trying to target with this page. The META terms and description are programming features that tell the search engine “spiders” what your page is about. These are not given as much weight as they once were, but still have some value. These should accurately reflect your search terms and phrases. The Alt tags are descriptions you are allowed to place on any picture on the page. It is a way to describe what the picture is about, but is also a great way to increase your keyword relevancy for the search engines as their “spiders” do read each Alt tag.

The keyword density and placement on the page is truly the most important factor in writing for the search engines. While it can be somewhat difficult to write coherent text while trying to consciously include certain keywords, it can be done and is very important if you want to rank well. It is important to make the text as readable as possible as you are still trying to provide quality content for the readers. This also will keep you from the dangers of spamming the engines. If you try and just go in and type your keywords repeatedly, the search engine will catch this and they will probably not list you. That is the best that can happen. The worst that can happen is that you can be banned forever by that engine and you may as well scrap the whole website (including the URL you paid for) and start all over again.

Besides writing with your keywords in mind, the other thing to be conscious of is where within the text you are putting the keywords. The search engines actually look at certain placement methods to help judge the relevancy of certain words. When you place a keyword at the beginning or end of a paragraph, it is deemed more relevant. Also, keywords found at the beginning of the page are ranked higher than those found later. You should be careful to include keywords near the beginning of the page anyway, because some search engines only read the first couple of paragraphs anyway. Google limits what it reads to the first 110k of information.

When you write good content that is directed towards the specific keywords in which people are using to find your product, then you will definitely increase your ranking in the search engines. Don’t be afraid to target a few different keywords on the same page. This will mix things up and may actually help your overall ranking. Your success is truly dependant on your initial research though. Choosing the best keywords to target based on relevancy, competition, and search frequency will go a long way towards making sure you rank well.