Marketing and Writing for an Online World.

The place to start seems to be on-site. I figured it will be the quickest and easiest task. Three days after ‘optimizing’ the website, it still wasn’t showing up in Google searches under the keywords I chose. I couldn’t even find it when I typed in ‘writing wizardz‘ into Google search. Guess my first attempt at optimizing did not go well.

Here is what I had done:

-I researched the keyword phrase. The one I chose is three words. Too short a keyword and it gets dropped into a pool with hundreds of thousands of competitors. It is important to have one that is just specific enough. My keyword phrase is a popular search term, but not yet saturated with competitors.

-I placed the keyword phrase in the site title, site description, header and footer code.

-As content was written for the website, I made sure the keyword phrase appeared throughout. I knew keyword density was important.

Okay, I was sure that wasn’t everything, but it seemed like it should be enough to get found by a search engine. Not likely.

There were just a few things wrong with my plan. First off, keyword density is important. More important than I realized. It must be properly implemented in several places:

-the document title

-the body text

-headline texts (H1-H6 when applicable)

And the keyword phrase must appear in almost every written element of the website. If you have images, the <img alt> attribute should contain a description with the keyword phrase. Same domain link texts, outbound link texts, the website URL, html comments, meta keywords- everything.

All those places I typed the keyword into, it was only the keyword phrase I typed- nothing else. Oops. Apparently, if your keyword density is too dense, then your website looks like unreliable spam and gets ignored. Had to go back and fix that, then I had to check it throughout the rest of the website content and make sure it was within the 6% – 15% range. My keyword phrase is now everywhere, but you barely even notice. Very ninja.

After these changes were made, Google cached my website. Of course, this all took place within the span of 8 days and I here that it sometimes takes Google 3-7 days to get a new website cached. Hmm. So was I successful or was Google just slow? Hard to tell.