There’s a lot of talk these days about how to attract more people to your website. Heck, I spend a lot of time talking about that myself. I even host the hugely popular Internet Traffic Carnival every Tuesday! But the conversation often leaves out an important part of the equation. It leaves out all the structural elements you can add to your website to make it more search engine friendly.
The first thing you want to make sure of is the URL format you’re using on your site. Take a look at the permalink of this post. It includes all the words in my post title. This is such a simple detail but is incredibly important. It even motivated me to move my entire website over from Joomla to WordPress back in March 2008. The words you use in your title are powerful keywords and you want them to be included in your URL.
Next, you need to identify the keywords you’d like to target. Once you’ve decided on a few phrases, you need to start building your site around those phrases. As an example, I wanted to target the phrase ‘Internet Marketing Services’ so I built 68 new pages on my website, all about Internet Marketing Services. I did that by creating separate landing pages for every local municipality along with that phrase. I also created a similar landing page for every single state, again including the keyword phrase in the title.
Having all these pages caters directly to the search engines. They see all these URLs and index my site accordingly. It also dramatically increases the odds that my page will pop up when someone searches for that particular phrase. Will my site come up for every single state? Of course not. But it will come up for a bunch of them and I expect it will measurably increase my traffic once the search engines have cached all my changes.
The last thing I did was include a paragraph at the bottom of each page stating that Tactical Execution is located in Walnut Creek, California, in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. This text, along with all the links pointing to those pages, also increases the density of keywords while magnifying the exposure of my most valuable keyword phrases – the ones in my own location.
You will also notice that each page has unique content and the images also have keyword-rich names. In fact, I even optimized the ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags for each image. The end results is a series of nicely optimized pages that push my site higher on the search engines for the exact keyword phrase I’m targeting.
It’s important to realize that anyone can do these sorts of things. Yes, it’s a lot of work. It takes a lot of time. But it’s an opportunity open to everyone. And it works particularly well for businesses where you can add a locality to the keyword phrase. By doing this, you dramatically reduce the competition you’ll be facing, making it a lot easier to get to the top. These are all structural elements that play an important role in internet marketing. Give it a try and see how your Google ranking changes.
