eBusinessmap

Sorry I haven’t updated for a while but I got a little Laryngitis and I sounded like Tom Waits.

At any rate, I’m here…and I’ve got a great episode for you. Here it is:

Now that you have your site up it’s time to write content. Content is king on the information highway. There is a balance of writing for people and writing for search engines. Some people say to disregard search engines all together and just write for people. They believe that writing for people will pay off in the long-run. They antisipate building links through the web with social bookmarking, linking to other blogs, or related websites. There is no arguing the truth of all these things. Writing for people is the best way to become a popular site online.

With that being said, should any SEO be thrown out the window? With most things it comes down to balance. There is a balance between writing for people and writing for search engines. That balance involves being very people focus with a dash of SEO technique always in the background. A food analogy might help clarify my point. All good food begins with high quality ingredients. Those ingredients add to the total flavor but just by themselves wouldn’t be anything special. Add a little spice and those ingredients (and the chef) become world renown. Great chefs use spices subtly. They also use spices to enhance the core ingredients. When writing content think of SEO like a spice. Don’t overdue it or people (and search engines) will see right through you. Keep it simple and maintain balance.

With that in mind lets review some good SEO practices when writing optimized content. These are the areas you will want to include your keyword phrases.

• Title Tag
• H1
• Paragraph Content (More keywords higher on the page)
• In the URL (remember to use dashes not underscores

There are other places to put your keywords but these are the heavy hitters for each page of your site. An important thing to keep in mind is Keyword Density. Keyword density is how often a specific term shows up on a single page. This number can found with a number of tools evrsoft tool, SEOChat tool, Ranks.nl Tool. Type in your URL then try the top three websites for a given keyword phrase in Google. Try to match their density with yours. For example, if they all have a density of 4-5% for a given phrase don’t try to out do them by having 15%. If you are out of range from everyone else you might be penalized or never be considered as a comparable website with the search engines.

Remember that pages, not websites, are spidered and show up in the SERPs (Short for Search Engine Results Page). This means if you are trying to optimize for 50 terms on your site don’t try to make your homepage and every page you write full of all 50 terms. Only focus on a couple phrases per page. This will allow for higher powered pages with more punch. If your pages are watered down with 50 keywords each you won’t rank for any of them.

In my next podcast I will discuss the technical aspects of on-site SEO. The little nit-picky things you might want to know when writing your content.

Until then, good luck!