You must be so relieved—your business finally has a website. It looks hip. You’re getting lots of complements and the content that took your spouse over a year to write is pretty good. So why isn’t your phone ringing?
Well, first of all, your website is not the field of dreams. Remember the movie where the ghost whispers, “Build it, they will come?” A better title for your website should be, “Build it, and it will get lost amongst 2 billion other websites.”
But don’t get frustrated, because getting targeted traffic to your site may not be as overwhelming (or expensive) as you might think—but it does take some time and discipline.
So what can you do? Well, one of the most important factors in achieving rankings naturally (verses purchasing pay per click ads) at Google, Yahoo! and MSN, is the content you have on your website. Now don’t get defensive. I know that your spouse worked very hard on your content, and it’s written at a college graduate level, but it may not have the keyword density necessary to get the attention of search engines.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of preparing your Web site—through your content, linking with other websites, and basic html coding techniques—in order to achieve higher rankings on search engines.
Well written, SEO-friendly content can do great things. After all, if someone conducts a search for a specific keyword, and that keyword is not on your website, the odds are slim that your website will appear in the search engine results.
When it comes to placing the content on your Web site, do not put the text in flash, and don’t embed it in an image—this is critical. Otherwise, the search engines can’t read it.
However, SEO writing adds a new twist to traditional business writing. You’ll need to incorporate the key words that someone would typically type in when searching for your business online.
For example, let’s say you own a moving company. Some primary keywords that someone would search for would be: movers, moving company, residential movers, Pennsylvania movers, Philadelphia moving company, expert movers, etc.
Then, take these keywords and plug them in to Google’s Keyword Research Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal . This will help develop an extensive keyword list. From this extensive list, pick the words that fit your business. For example, if you are local moving company based out of Philadelphia, don’t expect to get ranked for the keyword “movers” after rewriting your content. Focus on less competitive, and more targeted keywords such as “Philadelphia movers”, or “Philadelphia moving company” with an emphasis on surrounding towns and counties and “long tail keywords.”
Now it’s time to integrate these primary keywords in to your content.
A simple rule is to use the primary keywords around 3 to 5 times throughout your text. The number of times keywords are used throughout the text is called “keyword density”. Overuse of keywords is a flag to Google and you can actually get penalized. As you write, be descriptive, and do your best to be natural. Ensure that the primary keywords appear early and often and include them in your titles. Also, be sure to hyperlink some of the keywords to the other pages on your website.
Once you’re done, launch this page right away so that the search engine “spiders” can pick up the new keywords. Don’t worry about submitting your page to search engines; they will pick it up naturally. After your new home page is launched, start working on the rest of your website. Try to add an article or white page every week or month. It may take months, but in the end, “they will come.”
Joe Witte is a partner at Logo Design Guru and WebbyGuru , and has successfully started 3 small businesses including CentricSource and Travel Ad Network.
Now, with all this techie/SEO talk, don’t forget the basic rules of writing professional, enticing content for your audience. Here are a couple of basic writing tips that are far too often ignored:
- Capture the user’s attention! Get to the point. The readers should know in title or the first two sentences what your company does and the benefits of your service.
- Consider your target audience, and write in a way that will make sense to them (avoid jargon; it’s ok to be funny, unless you are a mortician or engineer or the like).
- Mention the benefits of your products and services, not just the features.
- Use spell check! You can quickly lose credibility with poor grammar or spelling.
- Limit your copy to 2 or 3 paragraphs per page. If the user has to scroll down too far, you’ll lose them.
- Write the way you speak. Unless of course, you speak improper English.
