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Quality Content - Keywords are the key
How do you create web content that is search engine friendly and that draws traffic to your site? The three most important things you can do when creating a new page of web content are as follows:
- Identify keyword phrases that are frequently searched by people seeking your services.
- Before you start writing a new page of content, always choose one keyword phrase that is going to be both prominent and prevalent on the page.
- Create cross links to and from other pages within your website.
When a prospective client enters a search phrase into a search engine, the search engine determines how well your site matches up with the search words entered. The placement your website receives, relative to your competitors' site, is highly dependent upon having pages of your site that include moderate concentrations of the words in the search phrase.
Imagine yourself as a search engine and you are sifting through Websites trying to figure out the information value of each website. The sites are in a foreign language that you do not understand, and there are no pictures. (search engines can't read pictures) You would be able to notice that there are higher concentrations of certain words and that there are links to and from other places that have high concentrations of those words. You would also be able to notice that some of the incoming links are from very popular sites. After noticing all these things you would make a judgement on which website has the most relevance to the search
Search engines can't read. They can only notice concentrations of words and links to other sites that have those words. For this reason it is very important to identify your keyword search phrase before you start writing new content.
This is a simplified description and there are many more variables that affect your search engine ranking. The fact remains that keyword concentration and keyword links are very important when it comes to your placement in search results.
When we work with clients we always start by developing a keyword phrase list. The list contains keyword phrases that are frequently searched on the internet for the particular service involved. Overture and Wordtracker offer sites that evalulate the frequency in which keywords and keyword phrases are searched.
The keyword phrase list also includes phrases that pertain to the uniqueness of our client's firm. This can be tricky because if it is a phrase that never gets searched, the client will get ranked very high, but never actually get a referral.
Effective keyword phrases can be developed with obvious words like "divorce", "lawyer" and "attorney". An approach that works well is to combine these keywords and your geographical location into a keyword phrase.
Good keyword phrases, for a family law attorney in a Evanston, IL might be: "Lake County Divorce Lawyer or Evanston Divorce Attorney".
Let's say, for example, we are creating a page that we want to be search friendly for the keyword phrase, "Evanston Divorce Attorney". We will want to write with the intent of having a high word density for that phrase. A good rule of thumb is to have keyword density of 5% to 8%. That means if the page has 400 words on it, then the phrase "Evanston Divorce Attorney" should show up 8-10 times. (10*3/400)*100 =7.5% Warning: More than 8% density could hurt your results with search engines.
In creating web page content, you would want to make sure that your keyword phrase is prominently displayed. In our example, we will want the phrase "Evanston Divorce Attorney" near the top of the page, ideally in a larger font or bold.
It is important that your new page of content has both incoming and outgoing links with other pages on your web site. You get more mileage out of your links if you use your keyword phrase in the links. For our example you would want the links to read "Evanston Divorce Attorney".
Similarly, you want to create incoming and outgoing links with other web sites. If you are a family law attorney, make sure that you are linking with sites that have both content relative to family law and are popular.(i.e have a Google page rank four or greater.)
Linking to the US weather service, which you often see on Family Law web sites, provides little or no value. Also, remember that incoming links to your site page are more important than outgoing links to someone elses site.
Finally, it is important that you regularly add new content to your site using your keywords and keyword phrases. When it comes to search engines having more relevant content is better and having frequent updates is better.
If you memorize these principles and take them to heart, you will be ahead of 95% of your competitors. More importantly, you will dramatically increase your internet referrals without spending a lot of additional money. |
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