SEO--A Quick and Dirty Guide to Driving Website Traffic--For Free!

The radio commercial for that new restaurant in town made your mouth water. You eagerly drove to the location, awed by the restaurant's ambiance: beautiful lighting, original artwork on the walls, hand-carved chairs reminiscent of a royal dining hall. You ordered from an exquisite menu with gold calligraphy denoting each dish--and then proceeded to chomp down on a rubbery steak with the flavor and texture of a bicycle tire.

If you're spending a fortune on Adwords without naturally optimizing your website for content, this is the same experience you're giving your customers!

Optimizing your site for keyword content is a mixture of art and science. The science involves using keywords according to the four principles search engines use to rank pages:

• Importance of keyword (is it in the title page? Is the pt size of the word bigger than that of other words on the page?)
• Context (does the keyword make sense next to other words on the page?)
• Placement of the keyword (with preference “above the fold”, i.e. the top part of the page before you have to scroll down)
• Frequency of keyword use

The art is in figuring out how to integrate these keywords in a logical way that gives meaning to the content, rather than simply an obnoxious, repetitive list of major keywords (this is known as "keyword stacking"--and yes, Google will penalize you for it).

Start by putting together a list of keywords beforehand--that way, you will be able to have a ready reference for inserting them into your text. If you don't know which keywords to use, take a look at the websites of some leading companies in your industry. Remember that text contained within images won't be picked up by search engines. Only actual text on the page will be indexed.

Use the following elements to optimize your website--and drive traffic to your site for free!

Page Title

The title of the HTML page should be relatively short and describe the page content accurately. Wherever possible, try to include keywords (without distorting the true purpose of the title). For example:

"Mayfair Realty—Foxboro MA Apartment Communities"

Metatags

Use the description and keywords metatags in the head of each web page. Make these tags different on each web page. For example:

"meta name="description" content="Quality, affordable, Foxboro apartments: Hillcrest Village, Putnam Village and Pine Tree Gardens."
"meta name="keywords" content="apartment, apartments, Foxboro, hillcrest, putnam, village, pine tree gardens, affordable, community, Mayfair"

Heading Tags

Most search engines more highly rank text used in heading tags, so make sure there are keywords in your headings. Use one h1 tag per page with the most important keywords. Use other head tags (h2, h3, etc) to provide variations and support the main heading. Example:

h1 Apartments
h2 Hillcrest Village
p... information about Hillcrest Village Apartments...
h2 Putnam Village
p... information about Putnam Village Apartments...

Page Text

Make sure the text of your web pages contain keywords and common phrases which people might search for. Again, be careful with the frequency of your keywords - if your page reads the same way an auctioneer talks, you're in trouble. The idea is to discreetly spread keywords around without making it obvious. Example:

"Mayfair Realty’s affordable Foxboro apartments are available in three distinct communities: Hillcrest Village, Putnam Village and Pine Tree Gardens."

Here's another example of subtly changing text for keyword optimization (the keywords are italicized for demonstration, do not actually do this for your site):

Before: "Hard to believe 6 years of "happy living"; truly there's no place like home!" You are all such wonderful, caring people." Jane Miller - 10/1/07

After: “Living in the Hillcrest Village apartments has demonstrated there’s no place like home! Dianne and the Mayfair Realty staff are all such wonderful, caring people.” Jane Miller, Foxboro-10/1/07

A correctly optimized site will not only drive more traffic, it will encourage repeat views--and the only thing it will cost you is time.