Internet Marketing Tips, Tools and Strategies

A website rich with unique content will perform better with Google and other search engine sites. The addition of carefully placed keywords will help improve your search engine exposure and relevancy of the content itself. In addition, using a content marketing strategy has become an extremely important piece to the search engine optimization puzzle.

When doing your keyword research take into consideration your product, service and location. What are the top words that identify with those 3 key areas. Put yourself into the shoes of your target audience. What would they search for if they were looking for the service, product or information that you have to offer? Create your list by brainstorming on paper or in Notepad. Create several categories and geo-modify those keywords if you are trying to attract local business. Take those keywords and put them in a keyword research and find some keywords that have search volume and acceptable levels of competition.

Ideally you want to start with 3-5 core keywords that you use consistently within all of your marketing efforts. This holds especially true if you are just getting started with a new site. Don’t try to target too many keywords to start unless you have the time and resources to go after more. You want to focus on these words for an extended period of time, typically 3-6 months to start depending on the competition level (some clients we are able to achieve #1 rankings for in 2 weeks, others take 12 months – it will all depend on competition levels for that keyword). Long term focus will help build keyword impact in the search engines. Each article should put the main focus on one keyword while implementing the others where appropriate.

Your keywords should be carefully placed within your title and throughout your document without being overused. Place them 2 or even 3 times within the first paragraph. After that once in each paragraph is adequate. Remember, you are writing for a human reader, not the search engines, this is an extremely delicate balance to strike and takes some skill to achieve.

Another way to embed them within your content is to tag (Alt Text) a photo used within your copy with your keywords. Use them with your social media posts and when sharing the related content.
One common mistake is to fill a paragraph with all of your keywords and then hyperlink them all to the same page within your site. This appears "spammy" and will not be looked at favorably by search engines. A general rule of thumb to utilize hyperlinks would be to use only one for every 120 words of content and evenly space them down the page.

Improving your keyword usage in your content marketing will benefit the way you are viewed by search engines such as Google and bring more traffic and viable customers to your website. To successfully implement a content marketing strategy all begins at the research phase. Make sure you take some time to do proper keyword research and are targeting keywords that have a reasonable amount of competition (no competition isn’t always a good thing). Your end goal is to have a “resource” site, with 100+ pages of content with keywords containing lots of great information for your readers in video, audio, pdf and the good old written word.