How to Increase Your Audience from the Search Engines

OpenView

December 21, 2010

Courtesy of Grace Kang, SEO and Content Marketing, Central Desktop

Choose 1 to 2 keywords that you want to rank for in each post. Use The Google Keyword Tool to choose highly searched, reasonably competitive keyword phrases.
Place the keyword in the blog post title, as far to the left as possible. The title should be less than 70 characters long so the title doesn’t get cut off in Google search results.
Include keyword-rich h1 and h2 tags. H1 and h2 tags are used to define the main points and simplify the navigation of a page. Imagine an outline – the h1 tags are the main point headings. H2 tags are the subpoints. Although these have great SEO value, use h1 and h2 tags only when they fit in naturally.
Include your keywords in the Meta Description tag. Although some say this doesn’t matter, sometimes the meta description keyword reinforces the keyword match in your title.
Begin your copy, if possible, with your keyword. Always remember, search engines read from top to bottom, left to right.
If you are linking to your main site in the blog post, use a strategic anchor text such as “<a href=”http://openviewpartners.com“>Expansion Stage</a>
Fit a keyword into your alt-text description if possible. Once you do this, you’ll start seeing more organic searches coming in through Google Images search.

See the following page for an example of how to optimize a blog posting.

(Please click to view the case study larger).

The title, which is valuable real estate, just says “Case Study.” This is not only a highly competitive term (over 2 million searches monthly), but the people who are searching for “case study” are not necessarily people who will convert into leads. Rather than “Case Study,” the title could be “Expansion Stage Consulting – Case Study” – which includes a keyword, the service being offered, and the main topic (the case study).
The 2 keywords to focus on for this post then become Expansion Stage and Case Study.
An h1 tag could be added at the beginning of the body as <h2>How OpenView Helped Expansion Stage Firm Intronis Develop a Powerful Lead Qualifying System </h2>
The Meta Description could be: OpenView Venture Capital Firm Helps Expansion Stage Firm Intronis Build a Powerful Lead Qualifying System. See the Full Case Study Here.
Link “expansion stage” back to http://openviewpartners.com.
Add an image into the post of the case study. In the HTML, you will see an alt tag for the image that looks like this: <img src=”casestudy.jpg” height=”200″ width=”200″ alt=” “>
Insert a keyword + description of the image into the alt tag like this: <img src=”casestudy.jpg” height=”200″ width=”200″ alt=”Expansion Stage Growth – Case Study”>

Next week I’ll post the method of increasing your audience from other marketing channels.