Foot In Mouth Disease, Content Writing for the People

What’s in Your Top 100?

Google recently modified it’s webmaster tools interface to be more user friendly and convey more information about how Google ranks your site. The best part of this is that Google now displays a list of the top 100 keywords, in order of importance on your site. This allows you to see what words Googlebot understands to be the most important words on your site, and that will directly affect your likelihood of being placed in a keyword search for that term. Obviously, if your primary keyword was intended to be, “content writing”, and it either doesn’t show up on that list or is number 99, you need to take a closer look at your content.

Common sense and Googlebot

So Googlebot reads over you page and your keyword is not in your top 10 keywords, what am I not doing right? Well, you should sit down and actually read through the content on your site as if you were coming to your site from a Google search. Now obviously, if you were searching for “content writing advice”, you’d expect that the site that you arrive at actually uses that word in several contexts. On the other hand, you don’t want to end up on a page that just full of that one word, spammed dozens of times across the page. You want to reach a good “Keyword Density“, that isn’t too spammy, but also reflects well when Google reads the page. Just use common sense, and you’ll get your keywords ranking in the order that will best benefit you and your placement.

Expectations are dangerous:

I received an I today from one of my colleges who had a chance to look at my blog. I was very proud to share my blog with my friend, because he himself is a seasoned SEO blogger. I know that being new to the “Blogosphere” or whatever it is kids are calling it today, I could use all the advice i could get.
I was surprised when he hit me with some serious issues with my blog right out the gate. I had made the mistake of using a Mac with safari to make my first posts, and it didn’t allow rich text formatting. This made my blog very bland. So he suggested to use formatting to spice up my text. Also, in my haste I had made some elementary spelling errors, which I have since cleaned up.

Be Open to Change

I think it’s very important as site owners to remember that your content on your site should always be under scrutiny. You should be adding or revising your content on a regular basis. You may get some good advice, from your readers, or your friends. Don’t let your pride get in the way, let others good advise help you on your quest for the perfect site.

It’s Worth It!
Content writing for your site does take an investment of time, but it is one of the activities that will definitely give you the largest gain in the search engines. It may take you 2 hours to get those tables lined up within the 2 pixels that you want and to orient that graphic in “Just the right spot”, but imagine how much content you could have typed out during that time! Think of your website as a work in progress, and not as a onetime activity and you will reap the fruit of your labor.

“Location, Location, Location” this business mantra has been applied to marketing strategies for years. This also applies to internet marketing, and here is how:

It seems like there are a category of keywords that are specific to an area. Certain industries are tied almost exclusively to these “Geographically Specific Keywords“, like the real estate industry for example. Realtors obviously are only able to service certain communities, and so their keywords become something like “Riverside Real estate”, or “Riverside homes”. Once you have determined what keyword you’d like to get placed for, you want to target your website to get rankings under that word. How does Google pick what websites are relevant to “Riverside” and to “Real estate”. The primary element is going to be what verbiage actually appears on the site. Like it says in the Google Webmaster Tools, “Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.” So, posting up hundreds of images of “Riverside”, and “Real Estate” won’t get you anywhere.
First, you should ensure that if your hosting company has given you any default content, be sure to remove and replace it with your own unique information. This content is by it’s very nature “duplicate content” and will give you no benefit whatsoever in the search engines because so many other sites use the same text. You can of course use the default text as an “idea” to base your verbiage off, but be sure that you COMPLETELY rewrite the text, and don’t just modify a word here and there.
Second, make sure your homepage includes your keywords. I know this seems simple, but you need to actually look at your page and make sure that actual text, and not just fancy JPG images contain your keywords.
Location also comes into play in deciding where to place your keywords, the search engines are not going to think that “riverside real estate” is a very important keyword, if the first time it is seen is at the bottom of the page in font size 8.
So remember, the location of your keywords will affect the location of your rankings.

So long and thanks for all the fish.