Have You Made This Common Mistake?

I get a lot of email, and they usually ask me SEO related questions. I recently got a couple of similar requests. “Why am I not ranking very well?”

Side note: If you send me an email asking for help, I’ll help you. I love to help people. For free. It makes me all warm and fuzzy.

The first case, I looked at their site and I wasn’t quite sure what the site was about. It looked like they did stuff, made stuff, and maybe it was for sale, but I wasn’t sure what it was. There were references to everything that this person was interested in, and they were very interested.

When people ask me why they aren’t ranking very well, I respond with my own question, “What keyword do you want to rank for?”. This person didn’t really know. “Maybe jewelry, or painting, or art, or photography. Oh, I don’t know.” Well, that’s the problem. You don’t have a keyword targeted and you have no words on your web site that would indicate that it was about those keywords. This site had all of those words, and more. What is this site about? I had no idea. Whatever, dude.

You need to have the words on the page to be ranked for the words.

In the second case, they knew exactly the two keywords that they wanted to rank for. I checked the inbound links, which is usually the most basic problem. This site had a few hundred links, while their competitor, who was at the top of the list on Google, had only 10 or so. Woah. That made me wonder.

I looked at the site and immediately saw that the keywords that they wanted to rank for were not on the pages. They were casually mentioned a few times, but if you just read the page, you would not know that was the keyword they were targeting. Other keywords seemed to be mentioned more times.

I suggested that the keywords go in the page titles. If you really want that keyword, then put it in every page title. Use the keyword where ever and whenever you can. Put it in bold. I suggested a stand alone page that was all about that keyword. Explain it. Use it in headings. Use related keywords along with it. Tell us the history, or why you’re passionate about it, and everything related to that keyword. Put a lot of words on the page that use the keyword or are related to that keyword.

A another cool technique you could use is to create stand alone pages for related keywords, or keywords that are sub-topics of the main keyword. In The Simple Guide to Internet Marketing Basics, I say it this way:

If there’s a post on southwest paintings of cactus, and another post on southwest paintings of horses, and one more post on southwest paintings of mountains, you could pretty well conclude that the site is probably about southwest paintings. That’s what the search engines are going to think and rank the entire site for “southwest paintings.”

That’s why there are those paintings in this post. They were painted by an artist in Jerome, AZ, named Mark Hemleben. The dude does awesome paintings.

When you create a web page, you need to look at what’s on that page and ask yourself, “What the heck is this page about?” What’s the point? If my Mom were to read this, would she understand what I was talking about?

I know you don’t want to be writing blog posts. If you did it anyway, you would be adding pages, and those pages would have your keywords on them. More pages, with keywords, means a higher score for those keywords. Stay on topic and use your keywords when it’s reasonable. Google loves that stuff!

When I write, I know what I’m trying to say. It’s all inside my head. The trick is getting out on the screen, so that everyone else knows what I mean. I need to be obvious for the stupid people (Not you! That other guy that was here a while ago.) Don’t mumble. Say it. You don’t know what it is, unless I tell you. You probably don’t even care and will click away before I get a chance to tell you, so I can’t mess around.

So my bottom line advice is the same that they told you in third grade: “Use your words.”