This is part 5 in my series on Search Engine Optimization

1. Introduction
2. Learning from your competition
3. Use Keyword Analytics to calculate the most profitable keywords
4. Incorporate your keywords into your page

5. Incorporate your keywords into your page content (this post)

6. Link from your social media accounts  (coming soon – subscribe to be notified)
7. Use social bookmarking to increase your ranking (coming soon – subscribe to be notified)
8. Calculate the high trust rank sites (coming soon – subscribe to be notified)
9. Ask for links from the high trust rank sites (coming soon – subscribe to be notified)
10. The final results (coming soon – subscribe to be notified)

Initial Page with Keywords, Meta-tags, Title, and URL

In my previous post we completed the main parts of the web page that, according to Evan Bailyn’s Outsmarting Google are the most influential areas that Google uses to calculate page rank:

1. URL (web page address)
2. Meta Page Title

We also added a description since Google displays the contents of the meta description tag in the search results page.  Beyond that we added only a tiny bit of actual text visible to the reader:

We have an <h1> field, a heading 1, which contains the key words for which we want to optimize, and a single sentence paragraph.

This skeleton has the elements that Google’s web spidering robots will look for, but nothing really for human readers.  We need to fix that, especially since the #1 ranking factor is inbound links and we can’t very well ask other sites to link to our page that says nothing.

Finding your site in Google

But first let’s see if our page has any rank at all.  There is a Google command that you can use to check if your page has been indexed by Google, no matter how far down the search rankings it may appear: Site.  When you add “site:url” to the front of a Google search it will limit the results the pages under the url you specify.  To check if our page is listed somewhere within Google’s massive database we enter this search:

site:dbeasy.com online form survey tool

The new page appears in Google search results:

dbEasy online form and survey builder tool lets you create web …

If we want to find where the page ranks among all sites we can remove the “site:dbeasy.com” command.  If we enter the full title from the page, “online form and survey builder tool lets you create web forms for registration, satisfaction surveys, poll, and questionnaires,” then the new page is ranked #5 on the first page of the results.  However, if we try any of the top five individual search terms that we optimized for:

• registration online
  
• online forms
• web form
• create forms
• online surveys

Then our page does not appear anywhere in the first 20 pages of results.  So let’s try to improve this by completing the content and attracting those valuable inbound links.

Creating Your Page Content

The text on the visible part of the page should be different from the text in the hidden meta-tags.  It needs to written for humans, not search engine robots.  Because of the way people read web sites it needs to be easy to scan.  Therefore it should have:

• Lots of sub-headings
• bullets and numbered lists
• images

One option would be to start with the skeleton and then flesh out the content.  We can look back at the keyword list from the previous post and then pick out words to combine into meaningful and logical headings.  Here are some possible headings:

• Online web form builder tool
• Create registration forms quickly and easily
• Embed custom survey forms in any web page
• Create a customer satisfaction survey

I add these to my web page as <h2> (heading 2) elements.  This will allow search engine robots to figure out what the page is about by looking at the heading structure.  You should have only one <h1> element that complements the page title and the rest of page organized with <h2> and <h3> headings.  These headings also make it easy for humans to scan the page and see what’s it’s about.

I then fill out the content by adding a paragraph or two under each heading, explaining in plain, readable language about how the dbEasy web form building application service will meet the needs of my target audience, which at the moment is any small business with a website.

Decorate with Eye Candy

To make the page more visually attractive we should add some images.  If you are not an artist you can get stock art and photos from many online websites.  If you do a Google image search then it will show all images on the web that have captions or titles matching your search terms.  However, most of these are copyrighted and you can’t just steal them.  But you can get some inexpensive images from commercial stock art and photo sites, or you can get free, public domain images from sites like Creative Commons.  All you need is one or two.

Add a Call to Action

If you are going to all this trouble the optimize your web page for search engine results then you probably have some goal in mind beyond just getting people to read your web page.  You want to bring customers to your business or gather email addresses for your mailing list.  Therefore you should always include a call to action: a link to your sales page, subscription form, or just an email link to get more information.  This gives you two levels of metrics; you can start counting the hits on your web page versus the number that actually take action.  And lean business is all about metrics.

Next Steps: Gather Inbound Links

In the next article of this series I will show you 5 methods for getting inbound links to your web page.

Be sure to like us on FaceBook.