I have been working on a variety of freelance projects this month, including a marketing brochure for KRMT, a large accounting firm in Miami; a proposal for a series of ghostwritten eNewsletters for a client here in Dallas; and my regular column for Horsesmouth.com. But, I am most excited about the recent updates to my husband’s Website, BigT-Music.com.
You see, my husband Craig is the singer for the Dallas party band “Big-T and the Bada-Bings.” We met when the band released its debut CD, Born to be Wild, and he sent a reviewer’s copy to ATOMIC Magazine (of which I was editor-in-chief at the time). Actually, he didn’t just send one CD, he sent two — one was autographed to yours truly. Then, he stalked me.
But, that’s a story for another time.
Back to the matter at hand. Craig is not only an amazingly gifted big band singer, but also a talented IT expert. So, for the past few weeks, we set about search engine optimizing his Website by changing the text on several pages. And, that brings me to today’s tip…
Focusing on search engine optimization (SEO) can help drive traffic to your website by improving your site’s ranking in the major search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! In our case, we targeted key phrases, like Dallas big band and Dallas party band, so the website will come up higher when people search for those terms. (Go ahead, try it. I dare you.)
In addition, you can improve your rankings in the search engines by focusing on a particular niche when chosing which key words or phrases to include. For example, if you target “accounting firm”, your site will be competing with 100,000+ others for the same term. Consequently, you might come up as listing number 11,486 in Google. But, if you narrow your SEO term to “Miami accounting firm”, you can rank significantly higher — even landing in the top 10.
Of course, you don’t want search engine optimized text to stick out like a sore thumb. You need to weave key phrases into the rest of the body copy so everything flows smoothly. And, the copy still has to motivate visitors to explore the other pages of your website, especially if you’re promoting a product or service and want to increase sales.
A writer who is experienced with SEO will be able to offer guidance on improving your site’s visibility in the major search engines. Targeting specific key words and phrases is not the only way to improve your rankings — you also want to look at things like headlines and metatags. But, when used right, SEO text can have a positive impact on the popularity of your web page.