There are three major factors in getting better rankings in the engines and therefore driving more traffic to your website. These three factors are Choosing the Right Keywords, On-Page and Off-Page factors. Once you get them there you also have to convert them to customers, but that’s a topic for another discussion.
Choosing the Right Keywords
Selection of the right keywords is the most important item you need to focus on to get started. You need to get into the heads of people that want your product and determine what they are looking for. You will want to go for a longer phrase for your keywords also referred to as long-tail keyword phrases. i.e. Weight Loss vs Low-Carb Weight Loss with the latter being the long-tail version. Of course this example is an over-simplification.
One of the websites that I am helping is http://www.TipsThatGrip.com. The owner had the idea that rain-guards, snow-boots and non-skip crutch tips would be good keywords. Rain-guards and snow-boots are product names that most people probably would not search for. I decided to go deeper and look for what people are looking for. People recovering from certain types of injuries would be people most likely to use the products that my client sells. After researching certain injuries we decided to focus on Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction Recovery or ACL which has a high-number of searches and relatively low competition for the keywords. We found very valuable statistics in the Google Keyword Research Tool.
On-Page Factors
These include building relevance for the keyword phrases for which you are wanting to attract people to your site. Key areas for on-page optimization include having the keyword prominent in the Title tag of the page, having your keyword phrase embedded in one h1 tags, italicize the keyword once within the content and have it repeated in a natural way a couple of more times within the text. This is pretty much the easy part. If possible have the name of your html file include the keywords separated by hyphens.
Off-Page Factors
This includes links coming in from other other sites. These should be quality sites with content related to your topic. There are a variety of tools for doing reasearch and helping to build these incoming links. the basics are:
- Find the other top ranking sites that are using your keywords.
- Determine who is linking to those sites/pages.
- Make a list of sites from that information to which you want to exchange links.
- Determine the contact names/emails for the people from those sites.
- Add a small number of links to your site to go to the sites to which you want to link.
- Start contacting them asking for a link placement of your site.
In asking for link placement, you should first complement them on their site and indicate which keywords you used to get to their site. You also need to provide the link information that you want them to put on their site. Provide them with the URL, the caption (which must include your keyword phrase) and an accompanying paragraph.
Re-visit these last few steps once per week for several months. You should start to see results in a few weeks if you are doing this properly.
After a couple of weeks we appeared at the top of page two for the phrase “recovery for anterior cruciate“. A couple more weeks we should see page one. The top of page one is our ultimate goal.
An update: Today someone searched on the phrase “cruciate ligament initial recovery” and got to the client’s site. We are number three on the first page of google! Just a little bit of work is paying off big time.