What about my site content?
After you’ve chosen the right keywords you can then optimize your site content. Search engines have bots that automatically crawl your website, reading it to find out what it’s about and then deciding which keywords each of your pages should rank for.
Pay attention to:
- Titles. Create eye-catching titles that catch the reader’s attention
- Keywords. Choose relevant keywords that will help bring people to your website.
- Links. Link to quality sites that compliment what your site is about.
- Quality content. Use unique and quality content to prompt readers to come to your website because they cannot find the content elsewhere.
- Freshness. Add new content on a regular basis.
In addition to your website’s text, search engine bots also read your website’s code. Here are areas in your code you may need to optimize:
- Title Tags. Make sure keywords are in the title.
- Meta Description Tag. Although it doesn’t have much of an impact on your search engine ranking, it tells visitors what your site is about. Make sure your keywords are in your description. More information on meta description tag.
- Headings. Headings come in a specific order. H1, H2, H3 and so on, with H1 as the main heading. Make sure there is only one H1 tag on each page. You can have as many H2s and H3s as you want. Also, make sure your headings contain keywords and are relevant to the content on your website.
- Sitemaps. You can read more on sitemaps here
Do I need to change my domain name?
Yes, domain names that contain keywords within them rank a lot higher than domains without keywords; exact match domain names rank even higher. For example, Hotels.com and CreditCards.com will always rank well for “hotels” and “credit cards” because their domain name is keyword rich. Unfortunately, exact match domains are often unavailable (can get costly if you should decide to buy one off the current owner) and are not very unique.