OK, so unless you’ve spent several hours with your nose buried in SEO forums and talking to various SEO gurus (or at least reading their blogs) you probably have no idea what optimizing your website involves. And if you did, there is a good chance that you have the WRONG idea from BAD advice.
I’m going to let you in on a few secrets. First of all, here is what optimizing your site for search engines does NOT involve:
- Submitting your sites to search engines
- Slapping meta tags on your pages
- Measuring the density of your keywords in your content (Say what?!)
- Filling your pages with tons of keyword phrases whether related to your site’s content or otherwise
- Creating doorway pages.
- Hiring someone who does any of the things mentioned above.
So, what exactly DOES optimizing your website for search engines involve?
First, I recommend you do your research to find out what keyword phrases people are actually using to find your product. Then name your pages appropriately.
For example, if you are selling baby slings using a Shop Kit Plus site, you might do your research and discovered that there were 472 searches for “baby slings” in the past 90 days and 426 for the phrase “baby sling.” However, the term “baby carrier” received 583 searches. So, I would recommend using the “baby carrier” phrase as well as the “baby sling” phrase.
Second, you need to name your pages using the keyword phrases you found. So, if you’re using the Shop Kit Plus, you would name your product “Red Widget Baby Carrier.” In the Shop Kit Plus, this will give your single item page the same name as the product.
On your product information pages, you might have a page with care instructions. So you might name the page “Baby Carrier Fabric Care.” This will give the page, at the top of the browser, the same name.
In the Shop Kit Plus, I would also recommend hiding the page title in the content area itself, then writing your own headline, using the keyword phrases, but written with your human readers in mind.
And third, the most important part: Write your content with your human visitors in mind. It must be compelling and either informative or persuasive, depending on the purpose of your page (sales or education).
This is optimizing your site in a nutshell. There are several methods of offsite optimization, but we’ll get into those later…
(For more information about proper search engine optimization, join SEO Power Up.)
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