The Power of the Word in SEO

If you want to dominate the search engines, you need to understand the power of the word.

We all know that the Word has power.  So, as Christians we read the Word of God and speak the Word knowing it has an effect on our lives and the lives of others.  The “word” also has power in the search engines.  In the case of the search engines, however, I’m speaking of the power of targeting specific words, which we call keywords, through search marketing.  Using the right words in our SEO can affect the success of your search marketing and even the success of your business or ministry.

So, how do you know if you are using the right words?

Keyword Research:
How do you know what keywords to target?  It takes a little brainstorming and a little research.  Start by brainstorming.  What keywords can you (and others) come up with that you think people may search for?

Of course, gut feelings can be wrong…and often times are in SEO.  So, once you’ve come up with several possible keywords, start researching.  Going into the details of keyword research is really more than I can get into in this article, but there is a helpful set of articles on the ChristianMarketingOnline.com blog which go into detail about “keyword research“.  The important thing is that you take some time to get real information about the keywords you are targeting so you know how popular they are and how difficult it will be to rank well for them in the search engines.

Targeting Keywords:
Once you have decided which keywords are best, it’s time to optimize for those keywords.  Rarely does a page end up being well optimized for a keyword by accident.  It requires intentionality.   Are you using the keyword(s) in the page’s Title tag?  Are you using the keyword(s) in the page’s text?  Do you have paragraph headers and are you using keywords in those headers?  By selecting specific keywords to target on pages and then intentionally making sure you use those keywords in the necessary parts of the page you can cause your website to rank well for those keywords and thus drive more traffic to your site.

As with keyword research, the topic of what to optimize on a page is more than I can cover in this article; but you can get information about optimizing the pages on your website in a series of articles I’ve written about on-page search engine optimization.

Targeting the keywords on your web pages is often not enough.  You also need to be targeting those keywords with your link building.  By getting other sites to link to your pages with the targeted keywords you are much more likely to rank well for those keywords.  If you keep at it, you are almost guaranteed to rank well eventually.

You can get people to link to you in a variety of ways, contacting other website owners, article marketing, blogging, etc.  However, the best way to get links is to serve your target audience and give them what they want, a concept I talked about in the recent Christian SEO Guys article, “Whoever Wants to Become Great in the Search Engines Must Become a Servant”

Return to the Word Regularly:
With the Bible, we return to the Word regularly because we learn more every time we read it and because God continually changes and grows us through His Word.  In SEO we should continue to return to our keywords as well.  By continuing to do keyword research we can find new keyword or discover when certain keyword are trending and others are becoming less popular.

By tracking our website traffic through analytics and our rankings  in the search engines, we can see which keywords are being most effective for our website.  All of this will keep changing the optimization of our  website as target the most effect keywords on certain pages and target certain more difficult keywords through link building.  This continues to improve the optimization of our website and grow our website traffic.

Photo by viZZZual.com

How have you found keyword research or intentionally targeting specific keywords helpful for your website?