Last Wednesday we asked the question what keywords you should optimize your website for in our SEO Wednesday article.This week we will ask the question how you can optimize your website for a certain keyword, once you have found out what keyword you want to get known for.
Let us therefore continue our laptop battery business from last week. You have loads of batteries for a Dell Inspiron N5010 laptop in your storage and would like to sell them. You would therefore like to create one page on your website optimized for the long tail keyword: “Dell Inspiron n5010 battery.“ As you create the page one of the natural things to start with is the title. The title is what can be found between the <title></title> tags in the HTML code. In most cases you will not touch the code itself, but it is important to choose a good title to your page. In our case the natural solution is to title the page “Dell Inspiron n5010 battery” since we are optimizing for that keyword. It might not be of extreme importance, but you should probably spend 30 seconds extra writing a good meta description of your site. The meta description should consist of about 150 characters, but do not play smart and write “dell inspiron n5010 battery, battery for dell n5010 battery, laptop dell battery…” as your meta description. This might sound like optimizing for the keyword, but you are not. Write a meta description which an eventual buyer will find interesting and informative and which will attract them to your page. It is good if you use the keywords you optimize for, but do not overuse them and do not make strange sentences because of them.
Optimizing the content of your page
Make sure the content of your page is up to date, looks nice and that it is informative. It was a time when people just wrote the keywords over and over again, without really giving out information (in a way they wrote content for Google and not for human beings). That time is history, and today you need to focus on reaching and writing to human beings. It might be tiring to create good content if you want to optimize your site for hundreds of different laptop batteries, but quality and content makes the difference, so it is worth the hard work. You should of course use the keywords you optimize for in the actual content, but in a very natural way. Do not forget to add images to your site and to let everyone know what the picture illustrate (also Google), use the <img alt=””> tag to write a good description, of course using the keywords you optimize for, or something very close to the subject.
If you use WordPress the title of your page will automatically turn into the heading (<h1>) of your page. If you write a longer article it can be useful to make more heading using <h2>, <h3> and <h4>. In this way Google will get a better feeling concerning what your site is about, and both Google and the visitors will easier find what they are looking for due to the good headers you use in your article. This should not be overused or abused, but a couple of headings in an article of 400-600 words is okay. It should also be mentioned that it is forbidden to copy content from others. Write your own content! You can find information somewhere else, but write down your thoughts and information with your own words without stealing content.
Getting high quality links to your page
Once the page is created and it has a good title, meta description, content and headers you could say that everything is good and you are ready for success. But, the job is still not done and one might say that this is when the hard work starts. To optimize for a keyword you will need links to that exact page from your own site and from other sites. Let us start with linking from your own site!
As you write lots of articles about batteries for your site and in your blog you will of course discuss the dell batteries here and there. As you do so, make sure to link to your article about the laptop batteries for Dell Inspiron N5010. Make the anchor text (the text you click to follow the link) describe the content on the page they will get to in a good way and do not write: “For more information about Dell Inspiron N5010 batteries, click here” (making click here the link). Instead you should made a link out of the actual text describing what the user will find on the page as they click the link. It does not need to be exactly the same all the time, but refer to the page with synonyms and with the preferred keywords in different order.
The links you create yourself are easy to arrange. If you use WordPress a plugin such as SEO Smart Links can help you create these links automatically. In addition you will need to get links from other sites to your page, and yet again the best links are those with a good anchor text actually describing the content the visitor will get to if they click the link. Therefore if you have any influence on the matter, make sure that the text with the link refer to “Dell Inspiron batteries”, “N5010 Dell Laptop battery” or maybe the exact keyword itself that you are optimizing for. If you know some laptop shop with a website who do not actually sell the batteries themselves you could offer a link exchange where you link to their page if someone wants to buy the actual laptop, and they send visitors who want to buy a battery for the laptop to you. This is called a reciprocal link and even though a one way link is better, this is also useful. But, do not change links for any price. If someone writes an article about vacation in Paris and they want to change a link with you, decline! You need quality links and not any kind of links. In fact any kind of links might do you more harm than good, so watch out for this!
Optimizing using Social media
In today’s world Social media gets more and more attention, also by Google. You might not see the immediate effect, but if your site about the Dell Inspiron N5010 laptop batteries gets lots of likes, tweets and other shares Google will also notice. They will not only notice it, but since these likes comes from actual users, they will understand that this page has real value and will be worth recommending to others as well. With Google+ they can go even further as they follow the actual users liking your content. If the user often likes similar content, they will understand that this guy/girl probably has useful insight on this subject, so when he likes such a page, it really means something. On the other hand… if you get likes from people who have never pressed their like button on any similar page, it might have less influence on your SERP. This is still only in the very beginning, but it is important to focus more and more on the influence of Social media, also when it comes to search rankings in Google. Once you have sold a battery, why not encourage the user to share the story, press a like button and spread the news to the world if they are satisfied? Once the snowball starts rolling, it will only get bigger and bigger! As they like and share your site the keywords you optimize for in the <title> will be shown all the time, so this is yet another important step in optimizing your website for a certain keyword.
