Whether a site is online for commercial or not-for-profit aims, everyone wants to be seen online, and I’m going to tell you just how to achieve it. This series of articles will show you the eight crucial stages in improving your website so that your site will get more and better traffic from the search engines.

Remember, SEO is no instant wonder, and it takes time to get it right, but the traffic that SEO generates costs you nothing (unlike Pay Per Click), and research shows that search engine users click on organic listings 70% of the time and paid search only 30%. Ears pricking up? Then let’s glide into part four with no further ado; optimising your site for the best keywords for you.

Optimizing Your Page Copy:

Content is king, was the old maxim for publishing. Well, that goes double for online media. Visitors to your site want high-quality, unique content; and if visitors want it then you can bet search engines are hungry for it too.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! are constantly changing their algorithms in an attempt to stay ahead of the competition. These engines are just like any other commercial concerns, and if their users feel they are getting poor results, then they will start to look elsewhere.

To improve the results that they give, these engines are getting ever closer to replicating methods of reading text that follow those of humans. As the needs of search engines and humans converge; the content on your page grows in importance.

The copy on your page is already the most important factor if you want to achieve better search engine listings, and its influence is only going to get stronger. Additionally, optimising this text will provide a better experience for your readers.

What text should I put on my pages?

The on-page content has to include your most important keyword phrases but must also give your human users useful and relevant content. How do you know what keywords provide the best content for your pages? Well, you have to do extensive keyword research to determine that; as I told you back in Part Two. Don’t tell me you weren’t listening back then…

Now, this research is essential for all your campaigns and for almost every part of the site, so make that sure that you get the fullest use out of it.

Each page of text on your site that you submit should have at least 200 words of copy on it. Depending on the type of pages you are writing this might seem like a lot of text, but adding keyword enriched text here will really boost this page in the search engines. Remember that each page of copy should be sufficiently distinct to merit its own individual page. You must also remember not to overuse each of your keywords. There is a keyword density measurement that search engines use to prevent webmasters from keyword stuffing. The best way to stay below this limit is to ensure that your text is readable for humans. If you mention ‘holidays in trinidad’ five times in a paragraph then you're not providing good copy for your readers and search engines will not like it either.

There’s no reason to limit yourself to optimising the pages you already have. Here you should take the opportunity to add additional pages to your site, which show fuller content to the search engines and offer a useful service to those searching your site. Think of content that your users will find useful, and add it to your site. You should aim at writing two new pages every month, as search engines also like new content on your site to appear at regular intervals, rather than suddenly to appear en masse. This shows gradual development and continual adjustment to your site.

Take the opportunity to expand on your products. Why not add a relevant and interesting blog to your site, which doesn’t have to be strictly about your products. If you sell food you could do a cooking blog, or if you sell nappies and baby products you might set up a maternity forum or blog. You can show the world how to use your product, put up the results of a user survey, as long as the content is useful and relevant then you should be putting it up. If you do this well, not only search engines will recognise your new content but also competing sites will start to link to you, and your positions will rise still further in the search engines.

If your keyword research has shown you popular keyphrases that were not optimised on your site, then you should start writing pages designed specifically for users searching on that term. It is for your users to decide how they come to your site. Don’t miss the opportunity to capitalise!

We’ve now reached the halfway mark in this SEO Guide, and hopefully readers who have been following these guides have learned something along the way. Next time we’ll take a look at how to Optimise Your Meta Tags – not as vital a task as it used to be, but still worth doing. Bon appetit!

Huw Thomas

Huw Thomas was born helpless, nude and unable to fend for himself, but recovered from this to rise to the position of SEO officer at LeadGenerators.