Holistic search engine marketing should be a strategy designed to please both parties: your human visitors AND the search engines. Striking this balance is not easy, but this post should make it less stressful than one might think.
Step 1 – Figure Out The “Intent” Of Your Content
Too many people start a post or website with a specific keyword or set of keywords that they are going to target or try to rank for. A better solution to this is to create a post or website with the goal of assessing a problem you want to solve, a question you want to answer, or an overall intent.This might be anything from teaching someone how to train a dog or showing them where the best place to travel in Spain is. Once you figure out the intent of your content, THEN it is time to figure your keywords. You might use a tool like the Google Keyword tool or a paid tool like Market Samurai.
The key here is establishing two things: “intent” and “keyword.”
Step 2 – Create A Great Title By Balancing Intent and Keyword
Let’s say you are writing an article about “dog training.” Obviously, the keyword you want to rank for is “dog training.” However, do you want to simply title the article “dog training”? No!You must strike the human/search balance. First, place your keyword in the title, like so:
Dog Training
Then, add to the title to make the article appealing and welcoming to potential visitors. Maybe:
Dog Training: The Last Guide You’ll Ever Need
This accomplishes two things: It helps you rank for the keyword and makes your content appealing to visitors and human readers.
Step 3 – Write Content For Humans First and Search Engines Second
Yes, think of your readers first. If you spend all your time focused on search engines you won’t have as much success.Make sure to write articles that are very comprehensive and unique. If you call your article the “Ultimate Dog Training Guide” do your best to make it the ultimate dog training guide. This might mean talking about why you should train your dog, how to get started, good books to read, everything!What you will find is that as you naturally try to cover everything you can about dog training, you will naturally use the keyword in the post (a great action for search engines.)
Did you see what happened? By writing for people first you actually naturally ended up writing for search engines as well. This is the balance and outcome you want to have.
Step 4 – Make Your Web Pages User Friendly
Sure, it might be great to include an image with an alt tag with your keyword, but it is always important to consider the user in the design of your pages. Don’t have the page littered with AdSense or pictures that don’t make sense.Don’t put something where it shouldn’t be just to get the right rankings. Try going on a website like Fiverr and getting some user feedback. You can spend five dollars to have a real person go on your site and tell you your thoughts. You would be surprised at the kind of great insight you can get for five bucks.
Watch As You Build An Audience AND Rank
You will find that by following these basic guidelines you will be accomplishing two things: Building an Audience AND Building Your Search Rankings.Building an audience means that you will have loyal visitors that will read your content, enjoy it, and then come back for more.
Building your search rankings means that these people will like your content, talk about it on social networks, and most likely link to it. This means more website authority juice which leads to higher rankings.
Follow these simple steps and improve your business and bottom line.
Questions? Comments? Did I miss something? Feel free to ask or comment in the comment section below.
This was a guest post by Jason from Survey Examiner, a website dedicated to giving useful reviews and information on paid survey panels.
Faizan Ahmad
About the Author:
This article is posted by Faizan who is the Author and Founder of TechSenser. Faizan is a Professional Blogger from India. You can connect him on Google+.
This article is posted by Faizan who is the Author and Founder of TechSenser. Faizan is a Professional Blogger from India. You can connect him on Google+.