Keywords are simply words or phrases you think people might use to search for your products or services. When you first start your online identity giving some thought to how people might search for your website will be very beneficial because you want to use these words on your pages and posts (or articles). Once your website is up and running you can check your Google and Bing Analytics to see what phrases people are actually using to find you.

Keyword SEO Factors

Keyword in your Title

Always use a keyword in your title. This may take a little working on your part, but a SEOMoz study found that pages that started their title with a keyword ranked higher than those with the keyword in the middle or near the end.

Use your Keyword quickly

Use of your keyword in the first 100 – 200 words of an article emphasizes that your article is about that topic. Then use your keyword periodically throughout and at the end of the article. Make sure to use your keyword in the image Alt-tags in your article.

Use your Keyword in your Domain Name

Many SEO strategists would purchase domains like “low-cost appliances” that exactly match their keyword phrases. This is a great method for ranking higher, but the effectiveness has been falling over the past several years. In fact, many SEO strategists believe that it will become less influential in the future.

A more important factor when thinking about your domain name is branding. Your domain name is the foundation of your brand. It is how users will find, remember, share, and identify your company online. Google likes brands.

Title SEO Factors

Permalinks

Keep the pages URL short and keyword-rich. Use custom, human word, URL’s, not the blog post number, like backlink.com/p=123. Google indicates that the first 3 – 5 words in a URL are given the most weight. For example; Permalink: http://www.gulfcoastwebnet.com/seo-factors-search-engines-love

Add modifiers to your Title

Adding modifiers like the “Best”, “Guide”, “2013”, “Review” can help you rank for keyword phrases that consist of between two and five words, usually used when searching for a rather specific item.”

Other SEO Factors

Use Multimedia

Text only takes your content so far. Images, videos, and diagrams reduce the percentage of visitors who enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site and increase the time on your site which are two SEO Factors used by Google to rank interaction.

Use Outbound Links

Using outbound links is one of the SEO Factors that tells Google your pages are relevant. Using links to authority sites, like Harvard.edu and Wikipedia.org helps even more.

Guest posting is another powerful tool. If you could write one article and have thousands of people read it you have the potential of exponentially growing your audience.

Keep Page load time low

By keeping your page load time below 4 seconds you will get a much better re-visit rate. You can decrease page load time by compressing images and using a faster host environment. If you are hosted by Gulf Coast Web Net we are on a superior VPN host site with significantly faster speed than the average host environment.

Write long posts

Google ranks longer content much higher. You should aim for 1500 words when you are targeting competitive keywords. Longer posts get more links because they have a higher perceived value. Short posts tend to be commentary. These kinds of posts are not very unique.

Keep your posting up-to-date. Re-read your older posts and update them if necessary. Re-reading your older posts also gives you the advantage of providing relevant links for current posts. If you don’t remember that you wrote that post last year then you can’t use it as a reference in the current post. Re-linking also gives readers a path to another post which keeps them on your website and reduces the bounce rate. This is what I call a triple dipper.

Social Media

By integrating sites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others you can increase your pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements. You may wonder;

“I’ve heard of people paying for followers. Maybe I should just do that. It sounds so much easier.”

The problem is that Google can identify “influential followers” over unknown ones. You should follow (and have others follow you) who are relevant to your business.

The quickest way to get unliked, unfollowed, and untrusted is to constantly promote your products. You should be engaging your target audience. Rather than just posting links to your newest articles, ask thought-provoking questions, start polls, host webinars, and respond to comments left on your blog or social media.

Have Fun

Most of all Have Fun. When you are having fun it is contagious and draws people to you and what you have to say.