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For best visitor retention and sale conversion rates, use conversational tone and provide plenty of text to generate interest. Use the terms that people are searching for.

Speak in simple language
Explain in terms that the average visitor would understand. Avoid using industry jargon when your target audience is the general population. It’s easier to trust you if they understand what you’re saying.

Keep text easy to read
Use short sentences. Longer sentences are often more difficult to follow. In most cases, a conversational tone will be more interesting and readable than a scholarly explanation. Don’t put too much information on a page. Instead, “continue” on to additional pages.

More text = more content
Don’t skimp on the total amount of overall text. Think of a search engine as a hungry tiger and your text as meat. Feed the tiger! Give it lots of juicy text to chew on. As long as page length isn’t excessive, more applicable words on a page means better results. You can work in many more keywords and keyword phrases in 300 words than you can in 100 words. As long as you break up the text with subheadings, bullet points, and graphics, human visitors will devour it as well.

Repeat yourself (again and again?)
Drive home important points by explaining yourself in a number of ways or by providing examples to illustrate details.

Put critical information near top of page
Important points and ideas should be visible “above the fold” to human visitors. Help them easily find key content without becoming impatient and having to scroll for it.  Long pages could include some links to “jump” to lower sections of that page.

Place targeted keywords prominently on page
Keywords that are introduced towards the top of the page actually count more towards that page’s search engine ranking as well. This is logical in that the main theme of any page is expected to be discussed at the very beginning. Think of each page as having its own headline, lead paragraph main discussion points, supplementary or supporting information, and finally a summary (including a call to action like “Sign up now!”). Thus, the first and last paragraphs on any page should emphasize the targeted keywords.

Use bold text for keywords
Where your targeted keywords or keyphrases appear on pages, make them appear in bold text at least once or twice to catch the attention of visitors and tigers! Using HTML, these tags are placed around the words: <b>word word</b> 
Yes, search engines give these highlighted words additional increments of credit towards pagerank!!!

Use the word “Free”
Find a way to work ‘free’ – in bold letters - into your site, especially the home page. You probably have something that you can give away, even if it is a PDF full of good advice. The internet was built on the premise of ‘free’. In fact, your customers may have typed in ‘free widget’ as a search term!

Use the words “Today” and “Buy now”
Why wait until tomorrow? Order now! Don’t delay! Take advantage now! Enjoy our product today! Be the first on your block! Foster a sense of urgency. Your visitors are looking for reasons to take action. Facilitate the process.

For best possible search engine optimization (SEO), keywords and keyphrases must be used appropriately within the text of pages.  This includes page titles, sub titles, headers, bullet lists, photo captions and regular page text.

Make text readable by search engines
Most of your page text needs to be typed as standard HTML which can be “read” by the search engine bots that regularly visit your site. The font must be available on nearly all computers. If a particular font is not available on someone’s computer, they will see it in a more common form (such as arial, Tahoma, Times New Roman).

Flash movies and images can’t be “read”, so any text contained in them does not count. This means that a completely Flash site might have horrible rank, making it less likely to draw visitors from organic search results. A site using images to display fancy text would face the same dismal results.  If vast majority of visitors don’t come from search engines, this is not as important.  Examples would be membership sites where only members are invited.

Searchable text must include targeted keywords, with an optimal “density” of 3-4% for each particular word or phrase. This means that if there are 200 words on a page that you want optimized for the phrase “black shoes”, you should try to incorporate that phrase 6-8 times. Any more than that and you may actually be penalized for “keyword spamming” by a search engine - lowering your rank rather than increasing it! 

Create distinct pages for each search term so that any single page might rank highly enough to appear within the first 3 pages of directory or S.E. results, even if it is not the actual home page. If you have several products or services, give each it’s own page where you can highlight the distinct terminology and characteristics. When the differences are slight, consider writing a page or article on one of them where you merely replace one possible keyword for another. For example, you may use the word “car” on one page and “auto” on another page.  Even then, you should edit the text to avoid a possible “duplicate content” penalty.

Utilize heading tags appropriately
HTML heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) carry more weight than standard text since their purpose is to show a hierarchy of importance. Try to work keywords into the highest level tag possible. Having headings and sub-headings also makes pages easier to browse by humans! Sample:
<h1>Main Heading</h1>
<p>Paragraph of text describing heading</p>
<h2>Sub Heading (work in some additional or secondary keywords)</h2>
<p>More text…</p>

This is a case where having a human web designer or at least good software is always preferable than most word processing web page generators. That’s because the word processor uses it’s own code instead of the standard heading tags favored by search engines.

Multiple subheadings, short paragraphs
Keep pages “skimmable” with the generous use of subheadings and white space. Make it easy to pick out important terms when visitors are quickly glancing at a page to see if it contains worthwhile material. They can then concentrate on sections of text that give the information they need. More meat and less filler! You can always link from there to ‘more details.’

META tags are a fundemental component of HTML and good SEO practices.  A META Description tag is a free advertisement in search engine results, so don’t waste it!

Your description “tag” appears near the title in the header area and should be unique to each page. It’s purpose  is to be an accurate description of page contents and goals,  of course including as many major keywords as possible. 10-20 words are appropriate since total length should be under 170 characters. This will appear in the results of some Search Engines, so it should not be just a collection of random words and phrases. Here is what the tag looks like:
<meta name=”description” content=”Brief description of the contents of your page.”>

META Keywords tag
While not nearly as important as Title and Description, the keywords tag should include any search terms that actually appear within the text of the page. The following practices are advisable: (1) keep your list below 20 unique words or phrases; (2) separate the words or phrases using a comma; (3) put most important word or phrases at the beginning of your list; (4) do not repeat words or phrases.  The keywords tag is not as important as it used to be in the early days of the internet.  But it’s use has been downgraded since it became an early source of “keyword stuffing”.

Talk to your webmaster about META tags.

Invite search engines to map your site
Be nice to those search engine spider robots which are constantly crawling the web looking for new and updated files. Invite them to chow down at your picnic! The META tag to include within the header code of each page you want them to find/index would be:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”/>

Upload a robots.txt file
Another welcome to search engine spiders to visit your entire site is by placing a robots.txt file on your server to tell them which pages or sections to crawl or index and which to ignore. For example, you may not want an images directory or javascript file spidered. You may also issue individual indexing instructions to specific search engines. The file itself is a simple little text file, which needs to be saved to the root directory of your site (where your home page or index page is). In other words, you would
upload your version of this to your web host along with your HTML pages, images and other files:

#The following allows all robots to visit all files because wildcard is used
#But all robots are barred from cgi-bin images and scripts directories
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /images/

Again, be nice to the search engine robots and you will be richly rewarded!

Use unique title tags for each page of website.  This is one of the most productive and easiest SEO features to build into your pages.

The title tag appears in the header section of HTML code, near the top of the page.  Search engines give it considerable weight, so create your page titles carefully.

Officially (from World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org):
“Authors should use the TITLE element to identify the contents of a document. Since users often consult documents out of context, authors should provide context-rich titles. Thus, instead of a title such as “Introduction”, which doesn’t provide much contextual background, authors should supply a title such as ‘Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping’ instead.” 

Brief explanation of page content
Page titles display at top of the visitor’s browser and should represent an abbreviated description of that particular page’s contents.  A title such as “Home” or “About Us” tells nothing about the content of a page, so it is useless to readers and search engine robots.  No “Welcome to my website” or other superfluous headings, please!  Proper titles should be under 64 characters in length, so 5-7 words is a good guideline.  Include the most relevant keywords or keyphrases. 

Avoid using “filler” words (the, your, home) since they take up valuable characters from a limited supply.  Avoid strings of keywords that appear more like “keyword stuffing” than a complete thought (”Web design – hosting – SEO – internet marketing”)  Your organization name should be part of your home page title if possible.  Here is how the title appears in page code:
    <head>
    <title>XYZ Shoe Company sells shoes and boots</title>
    </head>

Providing each page with a unique title and it’s own keywords enables visitors to find pages other than your home page when doing searches.  For example, the following are titles of 2 pages at Attraction Web Design.  If someone is searching for “search engine optimization”, they may find my (more appropriate) SEO page before my home page.
[Home]  Website Designer - Hosting - SEO by Attraction Web Design of Delaware
[SEO]    Website search engine optimization - SEO and keywords

Your page title will appear in the following places:
• Browser window title bar, and  when printed, at the top of the page
• As title for web page listing on the search engine results. This helps to guide interested parties to your site.
• Default entry in favorites (bookmarks) and history lists. This helps repeat traffic come back to the correct site.

Location of your office or customer base
If you serve a particular population, your location is a keyword too!  Notice that my home page title (above) includes “Delaware”.  Web surfers realize that they have to limit their search to a geographical area if they are looking for someone local to work with, so adding your state, city or town will rank you higher in those cases.  

Target your customer location

For the home page, I include my complete business name in case someone is aware of the name but not the web address.  The other words will give me a better chance of a high result for various combinations of searches, such as “web designer in Delaware”, “Delaware website”, “website design and hosting”, etc.

My business serves the entire USA, although most people find me by including “Delaware” in their search.  Especially if you only service a particular area, it is critical to include that state, city, county or locality on your home page and other important pages (both text and title).

Determining proper search terms (keywords and keyphrases) to focus on is critical to achieve the best possible search engine and directory rankings.

SEO vs. SEM
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) includes any web design techniques used to achieve the best possible “natural” or “organic” search engine results.  These are the regular (main) listings on each page of results.  Some SEO methods are incorporated during site development and some can be added at any time or on an ongoing basis (such as link building).  Most methods don’t cost a lot of money, but some require a considerable investment of time.  The time commitment will prove to be worthwhile as it is amortized over the life of the site at no financial cost.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) basically includes any techniques to produce traffic that cost money. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is the best example.  These “paid listings” or “sponsored results” appear alongside or on top of organic results for the same terms.  PPC terms are often sold through auctions.  More general or popular terms (such as “dogs”) are more expensive to bid for than targeted or less popular ones (such as “poodles” or “german shepards”).

Another SEM technique is inclusion in paid directories, either general (such as Yahoo Directory for $299), regional (state or city-specific)  or industry-specific organizations.

SEM is online advertising and requires an ongoing budget.  You can start, stop, or make changes to campaigns at any time and improve your results through analysis of traffic and sales.  SEO does not produce such instantaneous results.  It can take as long as 4-8 weeks to see “natural” effects.  To “cover all bases” a combination of SEO and SEM is often employed.
Broad (generic) terms vs. Targeted (specific) terms
From Wikipedia.org: “Not all sites have identical goals for search optimization. Some sites are seeking any and all traffic, and may be optimized to rank highly for common search phrases. A broad search optimization strategy can work for a site that has broad interest, such as a periodical, a directory, or site that displays advertising with a CPM [cost per thousand impressions] revenue model.

In contrast, many businesses try to optimize their sites for large numbers of highly specific keywords that indicate readiness to buy. Overly broad search optimization can hinder marketing strategy by generating a large volume of low-quality inquiries that cost money to handle, yet result in little business. Focusing on desirable traffic generates better quality sales leads, resulting in more sales. Search engine optimization
can be very effective when used as part of a smart niche marketing strategy.”

In other words, “drill down” to your particular specialty within your broader category, similar to the structure of directories.  Concentrate on these more specific terms:
Apparel > Footwear > Athletic Shoes > Running Shoes > Nike
Travel > Vacation Packages > Adventure Trips > Safaris > Kenya Safaris
Health > Nutrition > Dietitians > Vegan Dietitians > Chicago Vegan Dietitians

A page for each search term?
Create distinct pages for each search term so that any individual page might rank highly enough to appear within the first 3 pages of directory or S.E. results, even if it is not the home page.  If you have several products or services, give each it’s own page where you can highlight the distinct terminology and characteristics.  When the differences are slight, consider writing a page or article on one of them where you simply replace one possible keyword for another.  For example, you may use the word “car” on one page and “auto” on another page.

Concentrate on your company’s strengths and dominate your niche!

Keep the search engines happy!
Website traffic received from people finding you in search engine and directory listings is a beautiful thing. Not only is it cheaper than advertising, you automatically have motivated prospects, assuming the search term they entered is the main topic of the page on your site that they land on. It’s many times more difficult to rank on the first three pages of results than it was just a couple years ago, due to the exponential growth of
the web.  Use every tool at your disposal to shoot for the top!

Generate a list of keywords
Keywords and keyword phrases are the “search terms” entered into Yahoo or Google or any other listing of sites. If your site is built to satisfy human visitors, you’re off to a good start with the search engines as well, but
a little tweaking can squeeze out a lot more visitors.   Any word or phrase that someone may use to refer to a subject should be considered as part of the text in the page(s) discussing it.  When keywords are part of your text, you have a chance of appearing in search engine results for those keywords.  When you don’t specifically include them in your text, you’ll be out in the cold. 

If there are lots of possibilities, the most popular and targeted words or expressions should be incorporated to increase your odds for the most traffic possible.  For example, a website for “used cars” should consider various synonyms such as “autos”, “automobiles”, “sedans”, “pre-owned cars”, and particular makes and models.  Any one page could use several terms interchangeably or distinct pages could be created for each term. 
Your home page can contain more general terms and supporting pages will target more specifics.

Analysis of “key phrases” is a critical step for both SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing = Pay Per Click marketing) so it is doubly important. Both entail determining what potential customers type when looking for information and using those exact words and phrases to increase visibility in the search results for the most relevant terms for your business.  Yes, web surfers help you write your text!

Generate a list of your keywords, considering technical terms, common usage, and even slang terms and phrases since different people will search for your product in different ways.  Prior to finalizing your text, research, brainstorm, visit other websites, check a thesaurus for synonyms, ask your friends and definitely use tools such as the Google Keyword Tool. For many sites, your state or city or town can be an important keyword, since surfers may type in a search for “buy cars in Boston”.

The Google Keyword Tool is the top device for helping you climb the charts, and is free!  Enter what you feel is a generic phrase into the Keyword Variations Tab and your results are the most important terms (when ranked by ’search volume’) for that topic which searchers use to describe it. For pay per click advertising, it even shows the terms where there is the greatest and least competition. 

Google Traffic Estimator is also free and uses historical results to predict traffic for selected phrases.  WordTracker is another popular tool for determining keywords.   Abakus Topword Key Phrase Density checker can also assist with creation of “Title” and “META tags”.  These are important coded instructions that appear in the invisible, or HEAD section of a web page and are used by Search Engines to help “index” the page in appropriate
SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).   Finally, SEObook website provides a search volume comparison tool.

Search term comparison is a great way to compare popularity of terms and company names, so you can concentrate on including the terms most likely to be searched for.   Use the free tool: Google Trends.

Choose your favorite tools and go ahead and ask your customers what they search for!  Learn more in my Boost Your Website’s Profitability book!