Book Excerpt: Creating Keyword-Rich Content
Our book, WordPress Search Engine Optimization (now in second edition!) is out on the stands of all the upscale local bookstores and online retailers in your neighborhood. But why buy before you try? Here’s one page out of the whole volume to give you a taste of the SEO tips and strategies that you’re missing. You can buy the book at Amazon.
Creating Keyword-Rich Content
It may seem unnatural to focus on a keyword when writing content for your website, but it is absolutely essential to write your pages in a manner that will get them ranked highly in the search engines. No matter how well-written your content is, if it doesn’t contain the keywords and phrases that people use to search for your product or service, it won’t show up in the search engine results pages and no one will ever see it.
For this reason, the first step to creating content for your site is to begin with the right keywords. We learned in Chapter 3 how to research keywords, find the big-money keywords and key phrases, and organize and prioritize them. With sound keyword research, writing flows naturally: start with the high-volume, high-value keywords and write high-quality content for your site that focuses on those keywords.
It’s best to target one keyword phrase or group of phrases per content page. Recall that keyword overlap can give us a close group of keywords such as “Miami AC” and “Miami AC repair.” In any case, keep your content very focused on a small group of words.
Whichever phrase or phrases you are targeting should be used several times within the body content. You should make sure to include the keyword phrase in the title and headings as well as a few times throughout the actual content. It is especially important to include your keyword phrase near the beginning of your content . Most search engines tend to give more weight to words and phrases that appear in the first few paragraphs of a web page. Remember that search engines determine the subject of your page from the words you use on the page. If you don’t use the keyword phrase often enough, your page will not rank for that phrase.
What this means is that if your page is selling book covers and you are targeting the keyword phrase “buy book covers,” that phrase needs to appear on the page in several places. First of all, it must be included in the title and somewhere in the first paragraph of the copy. In addition, you should try to work it into the rest of the copy at least two to three more times and into the headings that separate different sections of copy. You can also add the keyword phrase to the alt text for any photos that appear on the page.
