This growth means that even though more people are coming online, competition for their attention is growing.  Even though your opportunities are growing, so is the competition for those opportunities.  So your website must make a good first impression – and quickly.  Here are some time-tested tactics to help you draw your audience’s attention and keep it.

1. Use keyword techniques

A lot of people think that on-page SEO (search engine optimization) is less important than it used to be before the web became “social.” This is just plain not true. SEO will be important as long as people use search engines to find things on the web.  You have to pay attention to what your customers are searching for and how they are searching. Then you should work to integrate these into your website.

The first step in SEO is to know the keywords and phrases that your website audience uses to search for your products or services. Use Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool to search for those terms. Once you have identified keywords and phrases that you think your potential customer is using to find services such as yours, incorporate those terms throughout your site wherever there is text and wherever it makes sense. Don’t sacrifice your readers for SEO though. Reader experience should trump keyword usage every time.

2. Create great content

Make sure that your content is:

1. Useful to your audience (Is your content so great that people will bookmark it?)
2. Free of broken links
3. Without grammatical or spelling errors and well-written
4. Original – no lifting paragraphs, sentences or ideas

3. Make your website social

This is the era of engagement. Give people the opportunity to respond to what you have posted. Have sharing buttons for Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. I use the Simple Social Buttons plugin for WordPress. This allows readers to tweet, +1 and like your post without leaving the page. Make sure you have sharing buttons so that people can subscribe to your content, follow you on Twitter, add you on Google+ and LinkedIn. Of course there are other ways that people can engage with you but I consider these the big 5: your blog, Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn.

4. Have smooth usability

Usability is about your readers’ experience on your website. Make sure that your site is easy to navigate. Google likes websites (I confirmed this at BlogWorld Expo in Los Angeles) that use breadcrumb trails, internal linking – but not overly linked, a visible search box for your site and a sitemap. If you have advertising on your site, keep within the 80/20 rule – 80% your content, 20% ad space.

Have I missed something in my 4 time-tested steps? What do you do to draw readers’ attention and keep them? Let me know… I’m curious.

Photo Credit: Chili and Lemon
Photo Credit: Velvet Bokeh

Tool #1: Google’s Free Keyword Tool

If you’re going to write content as a way of marketing yourself and developing an online presence, you’ll want to ensure that you can be found.  One Google tool to help you is Google’s Free Keyword Tool.  Keywords are those search terms that people doing online searches use to find whatever you are offering on your website: services or products.

You probably already have a sense of the words and terms that people use to describe your business services.  For example, if you offer wedding photography, that would be one of your search terms. Your clients might also search for bridal photography.  Google Adwords will give you monthly search results – how many times per month that term is searched.

One of the benefits of the Google Keyword Tool is that you can target search results for countries.  This means that there may be some more common terms used in one country that wouldn’t be common in another.

The keyword tool will also show you the level of competition for a word, phrase or term. High competition means that you’ll have a greater challenge ranking well for that term because many other sites are using that same term. Don’t let that deter you though. A good search term is a good search term. You’ll just have to be cleverer in your use of it on your site.

Tool #2: Google Insights for Search

Google Insights for Search can help you in a few ways. Google Insights will help you identify keywords and related terms to use in your pages and posts, show you trends over time for searches, help you to unearth new potential posts for your blog

Google Insights works best when you are searching for high volume terms and trending search terms. If you’re going to play with it, use terms like hockey, William and Kate (I didn’t try that one) or Oprah Winfrey.  You’ll be able to discover the region where the term is most searched, other terms related to it and which terms are rising searches.

So Google Insights for search can help you identify trends in search over time (from days, weeks to years), in regions and in categories.  And it can help you target rising searches and perhaps new content to write about.  Give it a try.

Tool #3: Google Wonder Wheel

Google Wonder Wheel can help with content and keywords. Wonder Wheel finds relative terms based on a search term that you enter in the Google search bar. Here’s how you access it.     Go to Google and in the search bar type a term – let’s go back to photography

1. on the left hand side menu, scroll down until you find Wonder Wheel
2. Click on wonder wheel and an image will appear
3. The centre circle is your search term – related terms at the end of spokes from the centre
4. Choose one of the terms on the spoke and click on it.
5. Now you have search terms related to your original search

You can use these terms to create related posts or to augment your content for your present.  Or you can uncover new keywords for your existing content.  Here are some of the results from hockey as a search term:

• related terms are hockey games, hockey fights (are you surprised?), field hockey
• When I clicked on an outer term (hockey fights), the WW brought forward terms such as best hockey fights, OHL hockey fights and hockey fights YouTube.

You can see that the wonder wheel can help you to identify new search terms, uncover related terms or help you find keywords that will strengthen the SEO on-page content.

Tool #4: Non-Google Tool for Search– Take a Straw Poll

Effective keywords are those that are used by your potential customers. So using the Keyword Tool is limited in that it does not reflect your customer demographic.  When I am doing keyword research for clients, I encourage them to take a straw poll among their customers and suppliers. If you were looking for my services online, what terms would you put into Google?

Ask you customers how they found you and what terms did they use. Did they use a geographic term in the search? More than one word or phrase? I also recommend that you search for yourself online too. Use your keywords and find where you are showing up in the search engine results pages.

Keywords are an important part of on-page SEO and organic search. Try out some of the tools and let me know what you think:

1. Free Google Keyword Tool
2. Google Insights for Search
3. Wonder Wheel: Go to Google’s home page and type your search term and then click Wonder Wheel on the left hand side of the search page

Photo Credit: Google Insights, Wonder Wheel

This new interface will show both search results and ad results. The Google Analytics Blog states that “We expect Google Instant will help users find what they’re looking for faster.”  So the purpose to this new feature is to speed up searches for people looking for stuff on the web.

Take a minute to enjoy the marketing video Google produced to introduce this new feature:

This new feature will impact SEO and how we apply SEO tactics to web pages and content. The Google Analytics Blog says that “with this change, you might notice some fluctuations in AdWords impression volume and in the distribution of organic keywords. For example, you may find that certain keywords receive significantly more or fewer impressions moving forward.”

As a web writer who pays attention to SEO, I think that Google Instant will encourage better and more focused content. Google Instant will decrease the power that non-content SEO tricks have had in the past.  All text SEO will become more important. This will then, increase the value of good content as a tactic for effective SEO.

I think that the web will be abuzz about Google Instant and I will be watching for others opinions on it and keep you posted. Benefits to users for sure, benefits to Google (I imagine) and benefits to web writers that remains to be seen. What do you think about Google Instant?

• has given a great backlink from their website to your website and helping your page rank (aka link juice)
• been the “go to” website for search engines to access and index information on newly “set live” websites

But it seems like something is changing. Over the past while I have been asking myself whether listing a new website with www.dmoz.org is as important as it used to be. I ask this question because

• often ODP website submissions do not get listed for a very long time, if at all
• many categories within the directory do not have editors to review newly submitted websites
• you can submit your newly developed website for indexing to search engines such as Google, !Yahoo and Bing
• search engines do not always pick up new website data from the Open Directory Project

In the past, having your site listed with the Open Directory Project (aka dmoz) was a great way to get an inbound link with some power behind it. Linking from www.dmoz.org has been the Online World’s Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and provided you with link juice. Link juice, according to netlingo.com, is online jargon referring “to the quality of a web site’s link power, (as in page rank), number of link votes, etc. – that are obtained from backlinks or links from someone’s site back to yours.” So if you had a backlink (or had an inbound link) from the Open Directory Project, it boosted your page rank and therefore, “the importance” of your page. This was a good SEO tactic.

Historically, search engines retrieved new website listing data from dmoz to update their search engine results. Newly listed websites were regularly picked up and indexed by search engines within a short period of time of their listing on the ODP – usually on a weekly basis. Now with webmaster tools, I can submit websites to search engines directly and have the sites indexed within days of “setting them live.”

So does that mean that you dismiss ODP?

I don’t think so and this is why… ODP continues to be the only FREE human reviewed directory for the World Wide Web. And it is still the only volunteer directory on the web. There are others, for sure, but they all come at a price… some are a one time deal and others have annual fees.

SEO Recommendations

1.  Check your listing – if you have listed previously with ODP. I know of several reputable, previously listed sites that ODP has dropped. You may have to go through the resubmission process.  Contact an editor.

2.  Be prepared to spend time tracking your ODP submission. Get on the forums to discuss your submission or email directory editors to inquire about your submission.

3.  Listing in a category with an editor may shorten your wait time (if it’s an appropriate category).  Even with an editor within a category, you might have to wait a long time for your submission to be reviewed.

4.  Consider using other directories – for a fee. Although ODP is the only directory that categorizes websites for free, there are others that you can choose from. Check out botw.org, dirjournal, joeant, skaffe, goguides, rubberstamped or sevenseek. All these directories provide backlinks and will add SEO value to your website.

Although I have high regard for the ODP and the work that they have done (voluntarily!), it seems that its importance and relevance is diminishing.  It might be time to consider other directories.

What has been your experience with ODP and what do you think about its value?

If SEO was a world map, we would constantly redraw the political boundaries. Some of the great SEO techniques included: using alternative text for images (since bots can’t read images), keyword meta tags, keyword density analysis, submitting your website to directories and using keyword meta tags. I have used most of these techniques in the past believing that clients would show up well in search engine results – and they usually did.

Does that mean that you throw the baby out with the bath water? No… I still use those strategies but I use them for different reasons.

I now use alt text to comply with Creative Common Licenses. I like to promote images and photos from people who are freely sharing their art. I use Flickr and abide by the Creative Commons Guidelines. Check out  Flickr for some fantastic images. And alt text is still useful for Google Image searches if you want your site or images to show up in searches.

I still do keyword research. I find search for words and phrases that people would use to find my clients products and services. Then I write text using those terms. This helps me to keep my writing tight and focused. I still include a keyword meta tag… but I recognize that this doesn’t necessarily have a big impact on optimization… it just feels right to do it.

I never did do keyword density analysis. I strictly focused on text and content.

I confess that I still submit sites to directories. I recently submitted a sitemap to Google and within a week, the site’s ranking had jumped by two points. What does that tell you? That tells me that Google likes you to use their tools. Check out how to submit your sitemap to Google using their   Webmaster Tools.

I also submit sites to the ODP – The Open Directory Project. The ODP is “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.” I love that. I love the fact that this is a volunteer community committed to editing and monitoring sites on the web. I like the human touch (although this can have its limitations, as well).

Some of the older SEO techniques are not as relevant as they were in the past but I am still using them. But I use these techniques for different reasons. What are some tried and true techniques that you still use? And for what reason are you using them? Leave a comment here and let me know.