the Art of Zen

What Do You Do with Your New Found Search Terms
Once you have your terms and you know they are terms that are being searched, then the next step is incorporating them into your site. I know what you’re thinking… Let’s just sprinkle them around the content, add some of them at the bottom of the site and maybe change the page title. Once again, it’s not that easy. First you don’t want to have every search term you choose on the home page. You want to have 1-3 terms per page. No more than that. The thing that most people forget is that a web site is for the ‘human’ visitors; not the search engines. What you have to try and do, and this is where it gets difficult, is to create a page that conveys the call-to-action for the human visitor and gives relevance to the content for the search engines – without making it hard for your human visitors to understand the message. This process is a science and requires a lot of research in itself.

Combining your search terms in the meta tags, body copy, page titles, alt (image) tags, and yes even the page names (page-name.html) of your web site is not something to take lightly. Too few and you’ve wasted valuable time; too many and you could get hit for spamming the search engines and your site will either drop in the listings or gets kicked all together. Also keep in mind that you’re not just doing one page; you need to do several key pages if not all of them and they have to be designed in a way that lets people know where they are and how to get where they want to be. Believe me; it’s not as easy as it sounds.

You certainly could do this on your own, there are several books and articles covering this area of SEO, but unless you want to take the time to research and read up on all the different factors for each different search engine, then I strongly recommend hiring someone to do this for you.

The next step is submitting your site to the search engines and directories. That will be covered in Part 4, Submit, Submit and Submit Some More.