Roy Hunter

September 11, 2009

MyMarketingCompany.com

Keyword Terms

Keywords are what searchers use to find information, they can be single words but are most often short terms specific to the information they are searching for. One of my company’s most popular keyword search terms is “Sarasota Marketing Consultants”.

For part two of this series I want to discuss further choosing keyword terms and their placement within your website that is very important to search robots as well as the beginning of optimizing your website copy for search engines.

When choosing keywords you need to focus on the terms most relevant to your site and variants of those keywords. Google uses a stemming technology that when appropriate, will search not only for words that are your core search terms, but also words that are similar to some or all of those terms. Basically, you don’t want to use the same keywords over and over again. Mix it up a little but stay on subject. A great resource for finding similar keyword terms can be found here: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ This is a visual Thesaurus and a very handy tool for discovering similar terms for keywords that’s NATURAL to your readers and effective for search engines.

Keyword Placement

In part one of this Internet copywriting series I defined the most important sections of your website to include the keywords and keyword terms that are the most relevant to the information on your website. The next things that would fall sequentially in the list I  began in part one are the following:

• Anchor Text: Anchor text are links to more information on your website. If you have a company that provides a kaleidoscope of services such as ours does, your website will be very segmented. Each one of those segments will be linked to, and those links begin in anchor attributes <a></a>.  Here is the basic html code for a link:

<a href=”http://www.mymarketingcompany.com/marketing-plans.html” >Business marketing plans</a>

There are two very key parts of the link, the filename in italics and the description of the link in bold. Search engines use this information to begin to understand the content of the page being linked to. In this case, the link points to our page on developing marketing plans. File names or descriptions that do not use keywords are not of any use in explaining content to search engines. When everything counts, you have to do everything you can to define the content of your pages.

• Alternate Tags: Alternate text is displayed in place of photo’s when your website is being viewed in a text only browser. If your photo’s theme is relevant to your website, it is a good idea to use keywords that are also relevant to the page the image is located within. Here is an example of an alt tag used with the title of the image:

<img alt=”Let us steer your business in the right direction” src=”business-development-image.jpg” />

• Directory Names: Keep your directory names specific. If you decide to break down and file information by category, keep the file names relevant to the information contained within them. We have a page for website development; this would not “fit” in a folder named “brand development”.

When writing effective copy for the Internet, remember the pyramid example from part one. The inverted pyramid style of writing is what is the most effective for of internet copywriting. Focus on keyword terms and their placement, and you will be on your way to having an effective website that ranks well in search results.