These 5 simple SEO solutions for common SEO mistakes can save you time to market and countless hours of frustration trying to reverse engineer competitors, simple keywords or rankings.
1- Don’t target keywords target markets – Keywords come and go and search behavior and user intent is whimsical this is why you should target markets instead of keywords. Since no two people think or search alike, you have to play the law of averages in your favor by finding the most trafficked and relevant keyword clusters to funnel traffic to your pages. This means targeting groups of keywords then finding which ones gain traction first.
There are pivotal keywords that act as a semantic thread that run throughout the theme of your website, so, by finding, consolidating and unifying those pages with internal links (the only links you have 100% control over); by the time you need to acquire links for ranking factor from other sites, you are miles ahead of your competition.
2- Consolidate the focus and intent of your pages – Don’t try to target too many keywords with one page; you are better off by using a new page to target a new keyword to use “exact match” naming conventions, title tag prominence and on page consistency.
In other words, if you are going after the key phrase “internet marketing services” and your website has other related posts on marketing, the first thing would be to title the page Internet-Marketing-Services.html , aspx, cfm, .php or whatever programming platform you are using.
Then use internet marketing services in the H1 tag, once in a link (even as an on page anchor #) and feature the keyword in the first paragraph preferably closer to the beginning of the sentence.
Then if you have any other occurrences of the keyword on other pages, link them to the page that will act as the preferred landing page.
Even bolding the keywords when they appear or using them in block quotes (bulleted lists) can also increase the relevance signal for the keyword on a granular level as far as taxonomy for search engine spiders is concerned. SEO is about the layers of overlapping signals that reinforce relevance simultaneously.
The mistake would be trying to make that page rank for web marketing services, online marketing service and all manner of related phrases from using off page link building tactics. If you are targeting other unique keywords, then create unique content-rich pages for each to provide a tip of the iceberg for search engines.
Every competitive keyword should have a relevant landing page (close to the root folder) to serve as the apex of the hierarchy for that keyword.
You can also use a singular, plural format service/services and alternate in the meta description to lock in additional keywords based on similar search phrases.
However, they will not engage until you have topically aligned the page in question with (a) enough links internally or (b) enough deep links from other sites to allow it to stem into other keyword variations.
3- Don’t Disproportionately Rely on Your Home Page for Rankings – Spread links evenly throughout a site using deep links. Deep links implies linking to a specific page with a specific keyword related to the target phrase.
This way when someone searches for yellow widgets, they don’t end up on your blue widgets page or at the home page (which will just cause confusion) or antagonize the user since there is no indicator of relevance.
The more focused your pages, the easier it is to cross the tipping point to gain a ranking for that exact match phrase. Don’t let your site suffer from theme diffusion from not having multiple unique landing pages.
4- Don’t ignore the Long Tail – Ranking for one word root phrases is nice, yet, you cannot afford to neglect the long tail phrases (key phrases using three of more words or local or regional references) while having enough flexibility to appear for the long-tail phrases which are typically closer to conversion as well. Someone typing in “buy a car” vs. “black 2009 ford mustang in new jersey” represent two different types of consumers. In this case, the latter is closer to conversion.
5- Traffic Must Convert of SEO is a Moot Point – Getting traffic is only the beginning, yes, increasing traffic is the gist of search engine optimization, but start with a goal in mind. Don’t look past visitors as numbers on an analytics dashboard, they are people with needs and are there for a reason.
So often people want SEO when the call to action, value proposition and graphic appeal of the page leaves much to be desired. If you have a destination page optimized for a specific keyword, then do your best to make that page emanate relevance for the main phrase as well as have a singular conversion objective for consumers to carry out (not multiple conversion points overlapping leaving them confused).
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