The Skinflint's Guide to Search Marketing
Free Ways to Optimize Content
When you've completed your keyword planning, you know what words searchers enter that should find your site. It's time to optimize the content on your pages so search engines will find them for those keywords.
Most people want to start content optimization by checking their page rankings, and there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you don't overdo it. You should know that search engines don't appreciate you executing hundreds or thousands of queries every day just to check your rankings. You can buy software to check your rankings automatically, but skinflints want it for free.
You can get the free Digital Point Rank Checking Tool to check your site's rankings in Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. Or you can try the rank checking tool from Mike's Marketing Tools, which covers nine different search engines.
But after checking your rankings, you're left wondering how to improve them. What do you do about low rankings, anyway? You optimize your content, that's what.
Search engines are actually clever pattern-matching machines. They are looking for occurrences of the searcher's keyword on your page, and they know exactly what to look for. They want to see the searchers' words in the title, in the body—basically early and often. But not too often—if you litter your page with keywords every other word, the search engines will penalize your page as being a ham-handed attempt to fool them (spam).
So, it might help to have a tool that can analyze your page and make suggestions, huh? Well, we've got two for you to try:
- Ranks Keyword Density and Prominence Tool. Check out how frequently you use your key phrases in comparison to your whole page. Search engines usually look for pages with no more than 7% density for your keywords—that means that your keyword occurs seven times in a 100-word page.
- WebCEO Free. The freebie version of one of the better search optimization tools, WebCEO Free can analyze up to 30 pages with a host of metrics, including finding broken links.
You can't blindly follow what any analyzer reports, but they can reduce your manual work and show you things you might have missed. Once you know what's wrong, you can update your title and body text to emphasize your keywords as needed—and that doesn't cost anything either, except your time.
When you've optimized your page content, you can move to the next step: attracting links to your site.
Want more tips to raise your search marketing success? Check out Search Engine Marketing, Inc., which contains a complete step-by-step program for successful search marketing for your business.