When you get on a search engine like Google or Bing and type something into the search bar, what you’re doing is entering a query. From your perspective as a user, you’re asking the search engine to bring you all the websites that are relevant and important to what you’ve entered. From the perspective of a website owner, however, the words or phrases that get typed into a search bar are something else – they’re called keywords.
Keywords – The Basics
Keywords are the words or phrases that search engine users might use to find your website. For example, if you’re building a website for your law firm and want to focus your practice on criminal defense, the keywords for your site would include – among many other things – your locality and variations on the phrase “criminal defense attorney.”
Once you’ve determined your keywords, you’ll need to focus on them when you’re planning and writing the content for your website. By focusing on your keywords, you’re telling the search engines what your site is all about. Knowing this, they will consider your site to be an important one for queries that contain the keywords you’re using, giving it a boost in their search engine results page, which will net your site more traffic.
Keyword Planning
One of the most important parts of your search engine optimization (SEO) planning is determining which keywords you want your site to rank well for. Unfortunately, your site won’t be able to rank well for everything, so you’ll have to pick and choose the queries that you want to get traffic from, the most. This process is called keyword planning.
If your website has already been around for some time, you can tap into one of the many SEO tools out there to see what search engine queries your organic traffic is coming from. Using this information, you can see where your site is ranking well, and where it can use improvement.
Keyword Execution
Once you’ve determined what keywords you’re going to focus on, you have to deliver on your plan by creating content that deals with the queries you consider to be important. This requires a touchy balance, because content that doesn’t include your keyword won’t help your website rank higher for those queries, but content that includes your keyword too many times – called keyword stuffing – will actually make search engines penalize you for trying to game the system.
The optimal keyword density for your site – the number of times your keywords appear in your site’s content that nets the best SEO results, without incurring a keyword stuffing penalty – is something of a mystery. Some SEO experts aren’t even convinced that there is one: They just recommend that you write content that “reads naturally.” Others say it’s 1.5% of your content, which happens to read naturally.
Myers Freelance Both Plans and Executes Keyword Strategies
Myers Freelance is an SEO organization that caters specifically to law firms. Our experience helping attorneys gain better online prominence through search engine marketing has built our knowledge of solid keywords to pursue, and our ability to find new ones unique to your firm. Once we have a keyword strategy, we execute. Contact us today to get started, and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to keep up to date.