Help clients find you online

By offering tips on your website, you’ll grab the attention of a wide range of prospects.

Consider this woman who’s thinking about splitting up with her boyfriend after living with him for more than 10 years. She’ll need information on how to protect her money during that break up.

And if that information were on your site, you might gain a new client without even leaving your office.

But first, you need to make sure she can easily find your website. She won’t be able to if you don’t show up in Web searches or if you’re last in a long list of search options.

Read: 8 steps to top search results

Consider that if this woman were from Alberta, she’d likely search terms like “common-law rules in Alberta” and “common law definition in Canada.” For her to find you, you would have had to integrate these keywords into your posts.

Though this sounds simple, several tips and tricks will ensure your online content gets noticed through a process known as search engine optimization, more commonly referred to as SEO.

Read: How to use SEO effectively

Show up in search results

To start, learn how search engines like Google and Bing produce search results.

Search engines look, or crawl, through large volumes of online data periodically. They recognize and index sites based on the keywords and content posted on their pages.

Read: Facebook introduces search engine

This is how engines know what links to offer people when they look up terms, phrases and companies.

Websites can be missed if:

• Popular sites do not link to them;
• They’re brand new and have low traffic;
• They’re not optimized for Google to look at them; and
• They had recent technical difficulties that prevented a crawl from occurring.

Though you can submit your page to Google for indexing for free, one of the best ways to boost your search engine visibility is to get other well-known sites to link to you. You can also pay for Google ads that show up above the organic listings section on Google.

Read: Should you pay for a better LinkedIn profile?

But the easiest way to boost your visibility to prospects is to use popular search terms on your website.

Keep reading for more on how to choose and use top keywords.

Which keywords are popular?

Free keyword tools can help you figure out which terms are broadly searched for.

Let’s go back to my previous example of the woman from Alberta. Using a keyword tool, I looked up how many searches the term “common-law rules Alberta” gets each month. I typed in the phrase, my country and my language.

The tool offers both global and local stats (local is defined as searches done within your country). It also provides a list of similar, associated terms used during searches.

As you can see below, my proposed term hasn’t been used at all, so it won’t boost the visibility of my website.

Read: Tech trends you need to follow

It turns out “Alberta common-law rules” or “Common-law Alberta” were better options. In particular, the latter was used during more than 2,000 online searches. There also aren’t many other terms people use to look up this topic, with most of the alternative options having low search results.

Using this tool helps determine which keywords are worth integrating into your site, as you can clearly see what people are looking for when using search engines.

When possible, aim for keywords that have:

• Low-to-medium competition levels
• Local monthly hits of about 1,000 and higher, though this number varies across industries and topics

Positioning your keywords

You must optimize your blogs and websites properly for them to be picked up by search engines.

Read: Social media increases AUM

This starts with placing your most important keywords where they’re most visible. You need to focus on:

• Titles: Place keywords are at the beginning when possible
• Headers: Use the terms at the beginning of at least one header within posts
• First paragraph: You should use keywords within the first paragraph or your post won’t be recognized as relevant
• Last paragraph: Google and other search engines like to see popular terms at the end of posts
• Meta descriptions: These are the short descriptions people see in the search results right beneath links and article titles. They’re called excerpts in WordPress.

Along with proper placement of these terms, you also need to aim for at least a 1% keyword density, but no more than 3% within your articles and posts. That means in a 500-word article, you’d have top keywords appearing five times.

Read: Creating your online presence

Following these tips won’t necessarily get you on the first page of Google—since many other factors affect your visibility—but focusing on top terms and whether or not your website’s being indexed is a good place to start.

For more detail on optimizing your search engine visibility, check out:

• SEOMoz (One of my favourite SEO blogs)
• WordPress SEO Plugin, which is a must-have plugin for those WordPress to managing their websites.

Also check out:

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