Everyone wants their sites to rank at the top of the search results, but not everyone knows the basics or what’s working to get there. (check out our newbie’s guide to keyword search) There are lots of ways to throw a web site together and hope to rank, but in most cases it simply won’t work. Some people are looking to throw together a quick niche web site with an exact match domain name and a few articles of the content. Sometimes this will work if you are going after low volume and competitive keyword tools, but in the end you still need to offer quality content. Even more important is that you focus on your home page and make sure it’s loaded up with some really high quality content and keeps the visitors engaged.
Ranking in the search results is no longer just about having keywords in your domain names, content and images… now it’s about social activity and providing value that Google can also see.
Rich Gorman of DirectResponse.net wrote up a great post on how long ad copy is still winning the war against low quality and content web site. I’ve pulled out his section on how to improve your home page content and SEO for everyone to read, and you can read the rest of them on his site.
Home Page Article
1. HOME page of all sites MUST BE STATIC.
2. Minimum word count is 1,000 words.
3. Main Content (Home page content) MUST CONTAIN “TARGETED KEYWORD(S).”
4. Before the content, place a H1 heading using the EXACT MATCH TARGETED KEYWORD – and nothing else. The title will have the exact keyword and design will implement into the proper H1 Tag.
5. H2 heading would be an additional title within the main content. This title can contain variations of the keywords. This will be implemented into the H2 heading.
6. In the very first sentence the targeted keyword must be used in BOLD.
7. If you are targeting a local area the location MUST be used also in the first sentence.
8. Variations of the keyword will be used throughout the page.
Once you start reading through the list you will probably see a few areas that you can start improving your home pages on.
A common problem that many wordpress web sites neglect to spend time on is building up one quality article with over 1,000 words that they will place as their static page on their site. Instead of doing this they might just leave their site as a blog setup and let the latest articles load up on the site. This is fine if you are running a “content blog” but if you are going to for a static site to rank in the search results, you are going to want to change this.
Other quick tips to improve your rankings and article content is to make sure you focus on using multiple variations of your keyword, include images that represent your content and also to implement H1/H2 title tags to break up your content and allow the search robots to see you are highlighting different areas of content based around your main keywords.
This can easily be done right through the wordpress platform. All you need to do is click “SETTINGS > READING” and then change the settings for your main page, as shown in the screenshot below.
Finding keywords to base your content and site around is also going to be important. It’s a lot more effective to build sites with , as there is less competition and it will also allow you to focus in on tighter content for your blog. This is something I’ve covered a few times on the blog and also wrote about in my long tail keywords series.
Follow these quick tips and focus on the quality of your home page content and you should see improved search results.
