1. Add your site to local search engines
There are literally hundreds of local search engines and directories hungry for websites to fill their indexes. Whether you're a local, national, or global company, this will help get more traffic to your site.
You'll no doubt want to start off at Google Places. Once you've posted your listing there, try this list of local search engines and directories for more.
2. Fix your meta title tags
Meta title tags are what you see in the title bar of your browser when you visit a web page. Take a look at the top of your browser window and you'll see the title of this article. In the HTML markup, the meta title for a given page can be found between the <title></title> tags. If you edit your own site, you should have no trouble with this. If you have a developer manage your site, create a list of adjustments and have them done for you.
You want to make sure the keyword you're targeting on a particular page appears in that title tag. Not targeting specific keywords on each page of your site? Better get on that.
Also, the keyword should appear as close to the beginning of the meta title tag as possible…of course keep in mind humans still have to understand the title so you'll have to get creative with ways to adjust your title tags while keeping them understandable. And this leads us to our next tip…
3. Move keywords to the front of article titles
The same rule applies to article titles. Search engines place more weight on keywords appearing at the beginning of a title than those appearing toward the end. So, to get the most bang for your writing buck you should always try to get those keywords to appear toward the beginning of any meta title tags and page titles on your web pages.
If you're blogging on WordPress, in most cases your article title will automatically be inserted into your meta title tag so you can kill two birds with one stone here. If not, adjust those page titles so the keywords are closer toward the beginning of the title.
I realize this may not be totally clear for some people, so how about an example? Let's say you're a Dentist in Cincinnati and you're going after the term Cincinnati Dentist. You have a blog post entitled "How to find a stellar Dentist in Cincinnati." Unfortunately for you, your keywords are at the very end of that title; we want to move the words Cincinnati and Dentist as close to the beginning of the title as possible to improve our rankings for those terms. So how about changing the title to "Cincinnati Dentist: How to find the best." It took me 2 seconds to come up with that example, so it could obviously be improved to entice people to read it, but I think I've made my point.
4. Adjust your keyword density
Keyword Density is the ratio of the number of times your keyword appears on a page to the total number of words on that page. It's a metric the search engines use to help determine how to rank any given page on your site. The theory being that on a page about Cincinnati Dentists, the words Cincinnati and dentist will appear more often than any other keywords.
So does this mean you have to count every word on your page? Hell no. Let a computer do it for you; there are plenty of free tools online that will calculate keyword density for you. You can start by using this tool. You can enter your URL, a competitor's URL, a keyword and it'll give you a detailed comparison of the keyword densities of the two URLs.
So what's the right keyword density to shoot for? Well, that depends on the niche. But you can get a pretty good target by running that keyword tool on the top ranked sites for your keywords. Then use their keyword densities as a target when adjusting your web pages.
If you're blogging with WordPress, you can use Wordtracker's SEO Blogger tool to quickly check the keyword density of a blog post as you type.
For a small to medium site, you should be able to complete most of these steps in a day or less. If you need help with SEO, contact us.
