The content is the king. Your main on-page SEO strategy is to build the
content interesting to your visitors, providing info and value,
correctly describing the services you offer, but not being a dull piece
of text leaving the memory two seconds after you have finished reading
it. At the same time, the content must serve its SEO purpose - to be a
landing page for search engine queries. Surely, the process of writing a
good copy is a creation, not the hack-work, but nevertheless there are
few steps that you can follow walking this path of easy seo:
- Discover your keywords
This is the first thing you should think of while starting to optimize your site content. It doesn't matter what industry you're working in - every industry, every sphere of human work can be described in hundreds if not thousands of different words! And your potential customers enter many of those words in the search box every day! You can't afford yourself to sit and look how this money river just flows downwards passing you by.
Think of what you're doing. Think of what your customers want from you. Try to figure this out with simple keywords. Then use synonyms. That would be the basis of your keywords. Then use Google Keyword Tool or Search-based keyword tool to find more synonyms and related searches that other people type in the search box. Conveniently, you can see the search volume per month and the approximate competition for each keyword which also helps you much to filter out the best terms to target.
Write your keywords down and sort them by demand (the amount of searches according to Google keyword tool) and then by relevance. Then, make a quick Google search for those keywords to reveal your competitors and analyze their websites to extract a bit more keywords of your niche. Select the most relevant and demanded keywords of the final list and proceed to the next step.
- Prepare the content
Now, as you know which keywords people are searching, you need to give them what they want - that is you should prepare a landing page for each search term. Obviously, it is not enough to simply write a copy and stuff it with the keyword. Quite the contrary, you should build your copy around the chosen keyword and the theme it describes. Write naturally, don't neglect the headers and the loud speaking title with sticky words in it attracting the attention of the reader.
Remember the important places where your keywords should appear? We thoroughly covered this matter earlier in this FAQ. Write a plain, natural-language title with the target keyword placed somewhere in the beginning of the title, write a couple of headers, name the file accordingly etc. How many keywords should each page cover? The best strategy here is to make a landing page for 2-3 keyword phrases, no more. You don't want to disperse the focus of your efforts. Each page should concentrate on several short-tail keywords and a dozen or two long-tail ones.
Repeat the step for all of your keywords. It may take a while to write a proper content for each of your target pharses, and more importantly it may be hard to write a unique, non-duplicate content for each of the pages. Do not simply copy-paste one text to another changing then "gadgets" to "widgets" and "foo" to "bar". That's won't work. Instead, write with normal language, write for humans (I never tired of repeating this one!). You don't have to prepare all of the pages at once - this is a marathon, not a sprint.
- Interlink your pages
A very important step! As you already know, the relevant links to a page with the proper anchor text are one of the most important ranking factors. Most likely, at this time you don't have many backlinks from other websites so building the internal links is crucial for you as it gives the very first boost to your search engine position.
So, review the pages you have and make links on them to each other. I do not mean the usual navigation stuff here. I mean find some keyword on a page and enclose it into the anchor tag, pointing to the page that is closely relevant to that keyword. Here is a picture to illustrate this concept:
You can see that the gadgets page links to the widgets page with some general term and to some more detailed page (or a product page) with the "orange gadgets" anchor text. Interlinking your pages is extremely important, but please do not overload your pages with links! Too many links hurt your positions and make it difficult to read the page. Try using link only when it's necessary, that is: when a link helps a visitor to better understand the info, or to choose a proper product, or simply adds some other value to a page. Also, you should keep in mind that only the first link counts, so you must assure that your navigation menu links are placed at the very bottom of your HTML source, while the links with proper anchor text - somewhere near the top.
- Create navigation and site map
Aside from the interlinking, your site must provide the proper navigation both for humans and for search engines. Ensure you have linked all the pages, check the whole site for broken links, create a site map that puts all pages together in one place and make it accessible with one click from any other page of your site. It is not necessary though to create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google - it won't give any preferences anyway.
- Keep working
While your newly-created pages start to obtaining their positions in SERPs, you should continue working - keep writing the content, optimize or change it if needed, monitor your competitors and so on. Things usually get changed pretty fast in SEO, so don't let yourself to rest on the laures.
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