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SEO Tip #1 Keyword targeting and optimization

Before any SEO implementation to your website pages, we first need to find the keywords or phrases you are going to target by using the Google Adwords keyword planner tool. This software will allow you to see how many searches are been done in the monthly basis for the services or products  you are offering. Once you have the list of terms or phrases you want to target , we are going to use the homepage to go after the most competitive phrase. Please keep in mind that some rankings can take up to 4 or 6 months to achieve, others can take longer. I  had an interesting experience with a client 5 years ago. We decided to go after a phrase that was getting 18,000 searches per month in Google, it took nearly 14 months to get a #2 ranking, but this phrase brought close to 7,000 visitors per month. This client sold a product that was going for $299 dollars, shopping cart conversion was 3%, monthly orders for that specific phrase, 210, that translated to $62,790 dollars just for one phrase. Not bad at all, right?

So keep that in mind when choosing the phrases you are targeting.  If you can afford to wait 10 to 12 months to get a competitive ranking, go for it.  But if time is a concern, optimize for less popular keywords, you will get less traffic but you will start getting orders in less than 60 days.

Now that we know which keywords we will be using for the homepage,  we are going to add this phrase to your homepage’s title tag. For this example, I will be using the phrase “baseball bats” which is very competitive as well as expensive if you were looking to purchase via Google adwords. So here it is:

Wholesale baseball bats | Baseball Depot Store

Did you notice that I didn’t place the main phrase “baseball bats” in the beginning of the title? This is because everyone out there going after the same keyword phrase already did that. So we need to try to be unique, different. You will get this ranking eventually as long as you have good quality content and plenty external links pointing to you. If you are running Wordpress and your website has an image slider functionality, make sure that the images are supporting your keyword phrase. So for this specific example, I will use the following names for my slider images:

adult-baseball-bats.jpeg

demarini-bats.jpeg

louisville-slugger-baseball-bats.jpeg

By doing this, we are adding our main phrase again to the page content, since is now part of the HTML/PHP code.

Please stay away from Flash. If you want a cool slider with transition effects and the ability to add TEXT, you can now accomplish this by using a jQuery plugin. The NIVO slider plugin is a good option since the packed version is only 15KB.

Now for the content we are going to use an H1 tag for the heading of the paragraph. In this case, let’s add our phrase again but also let’s include additional keywords that will support the main phrase and increase the page keyword density, Here we go:

Welcome to Baseball Depot – Adult and Children Bats

Or

Wholesale Baseball Bats by Baseball Depot

For the rest of the content, let’s add at least 800 words that will describe your product or service. Make sure to write for HUMANS and not the search engines. Your content has to be good to keep your visitors on your site for at least 25 seconds. This will help you lower your bounce rate which is an important metric in google analytics. Google uses this data to see if your content and website are relevant for the keyword we are targeting, the lower the bounce rate, the better chances you have to get a decent ranking.

Make sure to create “hyperlinks” within the home page content to your internal pages. Create links for your top categories, products or services. This will increase your internal link popularity and take some of that “link juice” or pagerank from the homepage and pass it to the other pages. This will also accelerate the indexing process.

If you have articles or testimonials, make sure to include them under this content and create hyperlinks for visitors to read the entire article or see the entire testimonials page. Use an H2 or H3 for the headings on these sections.

If you are running wordpress, make sure to add at least 3 columns to your footer using the widget tool and list your most important categories or services pages as well as your address, a Google map and business hours.

The last thing I want to mention on this TOPIC , is to try to keep your homepage under 2MB (megabytes) so that it loads faster for visitors as well as the search engines. Don’t forget to add your Marketing message or call to action, to the homepage. You need to tell your prospects, why are you the best or why they should buy from you.

Long Island SEO