There is no exact right or wrong way to optimize website content for Search Engine Optimization. One of the best ways to rank organically is to make sure the search engines determine that your content is relevant to the topic that a user searches. It all comes down to understanding how search engines read your website’s content and how they rank your website based on how well your web site provides this information.

1) When it comes to using keywords, utilizing them properly can greatly increase your organic traffic. It all comes down to how you use the right keywords in order to make your content relevant.

2) Emphasize your keywords through the webpage titles and headers. These carry greater weight when it comes to keyword usage than the body of your content. Search engines read these labels as the “outline” for your entire content. Make sure to include your keywords in the page title and headers to let search engines and your searchers know what your site is all about. Use title and header tags sparingly though. The over use of keywords is called keyword spamming. If the search engine crawlers determine that you are keyword spamming, your website may lose ranking in the search results.

3) Accentuate the relevance of your content with internet searches by highlighting important terms and phrases in your content’s body through the use of italicized, bold, or underlined text. This would allow key phrases in your webpage to stand out. Having your keywords stand out helps readers quickly narrow in on the parts of the page that they are looking for.

4) Keywords have to relate to your page’s content. You can’t put keywords relating to cars on a web page about bicycles and expect either the reader or the search engines to respond favorably. Effective use of keywords truly depends on making your web page useful. If you try to “game” the system, eventually the search engines and the users will start to ignore you.

5) One of the best ways to research what keywords users are searching for is with online tools. Here at Get Rich Click, we use a tool called KeywordSpy, you can search for websites relevant to your industry, go through their keywords, and collect useful terms you can focus on at your website.  Along with keywords, you can find out how popular a keyword is with metrics like Search Volume and Search Results analysis. Having access to known keywords with quality searches will help with your site content.

6) Avoid overdoing it. The idea of keyword research and on page optimization is to make your website relevant with online searches in order to establish credible rankings. However, overdoing the usage of keywords and techniques can also cause a backlash effect. As much as it is a task to make your website appropriate it is also important to make the content coherent.

7) Proofread your final content with your keywords, read it out loud to see if it makes sense or causes confusion.  Avoid redundancy.  Have someone else read it to see if it makes sense.  If you have used the same keyword more than twice within four sentences, you have gone overboard.

Remember, you have to work to get the keywords for your web page right. Don’t give up too soon, and make sure that you follow the steps above.

Try a free trial of Keyword Spy today, complements of Get Rich Click!

One of my favorite Get Rick Click stories is of Zachary and Nathan Doctor,
two brothers who started a business in their dad’s garage when Zachary
was 10 years old and Nathan was 12.

The Doctor boys were your average pre-teens. They went to school,
played sports and found all kinds of ways to have fun. They also lived in
an entrepreneurial family. Zachary and Nathan did the typical entrepreneurial
businesses kids do, from setting up lemonade stands to finding
other ways to make a few bucks. Their dad is Lou Doctor, a successful
executive living in Silicon Valley. He runs a boutique investment banking
firm called Arbor Advisors.

Lou Doctor enjoys cycling. His sons also adopted the sport early on.
All three learned that in the world of cycling, special bike tires are the
equipment of choice. You must have the right tires for the right application,
from paved road to mountain path.

One day in 2002 Lou and his bike club ordered tires online from a specialty
firm in the United Kingdom. To get the best price, they had to order
in quantities of ten tires per type. When they received their first order, Lou
and his bike club were not thrilled. The tires were an odd color. No one in
the bike club wanted them on their bikes.

Lou Doctor struck a deal with his sons. He gave the boys the tires and
suggested they try to sell them on eBay. They could sell them for whatever
price they wanted, but he needed $30 a tire to cover his costs. Above
that, the boys keep anything they got above that as profit. The sons went
into action. They snapped digital photos of the ugly-colored tires, posted
them for sale on eBay and waited.

Not only did the boys sell them in quick order, but they sold them for
$35 each. Lou got his $300 investment back and the boys pocketed $50
for their efforts. The boys asked their dad to order ten extra tires next
time. The same thing happened. The boys sold the ten extra tires and
again made a tidy profit.

Zachary and Nathan wanted more! They were making money and having
fun at the same time. Soon there were more orders, more sales, more
customers and more profits. They went from ordering 10 tires to ordering
50 and as many as 500 at a time from the retailer in the United Kingdom,
who eventually gave them discounts for large volume purchases.
Then the boys opened an eBay store. They got up each day at 5:00 a.m.
and pulled the items, packed the orders, filled out the shipping labels,
and got to school at 7:30 a.m. When they came home, they went to work
printing out the orders and getting them ready for fulfillment. Every day
at 6:00 P.M., they took the packages to the local post office, where they
became known for pulling bins of boxes and placing them directly on the
back of the post office truck before it left for the distribution center.
It wasn’t long before the brothers launched BikeTiresDirect.com, their
own e-commerce website. The business kept growing — and in the Get
Rich Click spirit, Zachary and Nathan pursued online marketing, learning
how to buy the right keyword combinations to get higher rankings in
the search engines. They attribute much of their success to buying traffic
via keywords … thousands of keywords and keyword combinations
which increases the number of “free” hits they get on Google, Yahoo and
other search engines.

Thanks to the Doctor family, their tire supplier became the largest supplier
of specialty bike tires in the United Kingdom. Today Zach is 17 and
Nathan is 19. They have less time to work at the company, but they still
help with buying keywords and work during the summers. The company,
with over $8 million in annual sales at last count, now sells everything for the serious
cyclist. And it’s still growing.

Order Delivery Time in Five Minutes
Customers in virtually every country in the world order from Bike-
TiresDirect. Occasionally an order comes from a Silicon Valley customer.
For fun, Lou Doctor would drive his kids to the customer’s home, ring the
bell and deliver the order — allowing the boys to meet and get to know
some of their customers.

One day, they received an order from someone who lived only a few
streets from their home. They quickly fulfilled the order, jumped in the
car and drove to the customer’s home, arriving five minutes after the order
had been placed. When the customer answered the door, ten-year-old
Zachary and twelve-year-old Nathan were standing there, order in hand.
Needless to say, the boys had a new customer for life. Word of mouth
referrals from the delighted customer generated even more business for
BikeTiresDirect.

(The above excerpt is from the book, Get Rich Click!, due out May 2nd, 2011.)