by Andy MacDonald, 3/17/2006
Look from a new perspective
If you have a site about restoring classic cars, make a page about the evolution of headlights over the decades. Add another page about how and where to find hard to find classic parts.
Content should be:
- Easy to follow - and well written for a human reader, not a search engine.
- Unique - write it yourself or hire a writer.
- Varied - Don't fill your page with the same keyword repeatedly or you risk being considered spam. Examine the keyword densities of your keyword in the top 10 listings it returns in a particular engine. Stay within that number.
Take a few more evenings or weekends and improve your ranks by doing some research and digging, and applying that invaluable knowledge strategically to your web site.
Kinds of SEO research you can do to win
There are SEO companies online who offer various reports that can save you a lot of the legwork. Even the simplest of tasks can be too time consuming when you need to focus on editing your pages. For example, finding your current rank, if any, in all of the major engines for all of the keywords you want to rank could take a day on your own. Some other types of reports available are:
- Keyword Research
- Competition Research
- On Page Optimization
- Off Page or Link Reports
Keyword Research
A list of keywords you or I might make sitting down with a pencil and paper is a good start. The important word here is "start". That list is dozens of revisions away from completion. It will expand and contract many times as further information is gathered.
Are your words focused and targeted enough so you'll attract qualified leads? Are there related words and phrases that you haven't thought of? What words does your competition have throughout their pages? And most importantly, are the words you've chosen actually being typed into search engines?
You can find many different levels of keyword services from simple analysis of your existing pages to research and development of an entire list ready for use in your pages, Adwords or PPC campaigns.
Competition Research
Who is ranking now? Who is in the positions where you want to be? Examine your competition's pages with a microscope. An Understanding of those you want to outrank gives you a working outline to revise your own. (Do NOT copy their content.) Focus on trends, keywords, densities, titles, page elements... their pages, structures and their links.
On Page Optimization
A report like this analyzes the words in the elements on your page like titles and boldface or headings as well as your body copy, and link text. It also tells you information about keyword density. Earlier I mentioned that using a keyword too many times on a page could be considered spam. An analysis like this will show how many times each word, word pairs and groups of words were used on a page and what percentage of all the words they are.
A report on a high ranking competitor's site will give you some insight into a page that is successfully ranking for keywords you want.
Off Page or Link Reports
As soon as you start learning about search engine optimization, you'll understand what a key role good quality links play in determining rank. These types of analysis will show who is linking to you, or even better, who is linking to a ranking competitor. You can get some ideas of sites to list with and an approximate number of links of a particular quality that you'll need to rank.