If you are using your content to draw the attention of search engines you will find many different opinions on how to best optimize your web pages.

Outlined here are some simple techniques that will do well with any content page and especially well with keywords that are not being commonly used by other sites. If you can locate keywords related to your website that are not being currently focused on by bigger sites you may find your pages easily placing high in the natural search engine results.

First add your keyword or phrase in the <title> tag.

Next add the words or phrase in the <meta keyword> tag as well as a short descriptive line in the <meta description> tag. Do not become overly repetitive or advertising with your wording, although using words that incite curiosity is fine since they may appear as the description used for your listing.

When writing your headline be sure to use the keyword or phrase and place it in Header 1 tags which will appear as <h1> and </h1> on either end of your title.

Try to use the word or phrase several times in the first few hundred words that appear on your webpage. If your site has columns, be sure to count the first column as your starting point as the search engines will read left to right just like you do – down the first column before moving to the next.

Make use of the keywords or phrases by integrating them into your content as naturally as possible. It may be possible for the search engines to determine if a word is not fitting into proper grammar usage and is only being used for optimization.

In the same regard you should be cautious about over using the word or phrase which may also ‘tip off’ the search engines.

Whether these tactics work for you is greatly determined by the quality of the research used to select keywords or phrases as well as other factors, known and unknown, which the search engines apply to determine your position in the listings.

Optimizing several pages with different keywords can allow you to test this out. Words or phrases that have high competition may be less likely to make it to the top, but if the competition didn’t do their homework (especially if you’re working in a niche area) you may be very surprised by the results.

A Quick Note for Pay Per Click Users

As promised at the outset, here is a simple guide for getting started with PPC advertising. You should find it to be complimentary to your overall marketing program and a good start to finding traffic while you continue to build your natural search engine placement with the methods outlined earlier.

Research Your Keywords

Don’t waste your money bidding on words or phrases that will attract the wrong audience or too broad of an audience or you will quickly go through your advertising budget with very little results.

Use programs like the one found at www.Wordtracker.com that can assist you in creating a list of keywords and phrases that will relate to your topic.  You can also easily find out which words have large amounts of competition as well as the current bids for those words.

When you have made your keyword and phrases list, develop a simple ad that is both clear and descriptive. Use proven advertising copy words like “how to…”, “learn”, “save”, “free” and “easy” in your description. Create curiosity while still providing enough specific information that you will not attract under qualified traffic.

Use each keyword or phrase you are bidding on in its own description rather than giving the same ad copy to every word. Test your campaigns and keep to a budget.

Figure out how many customers you need to make a sale and based on that figure you can work out how much you are willing to spend to attract customers through pay per click advertising.

If your product sells on average for $20 and it takes 100 visitors to make a sale you can afford to spend 20 cents per visitor to make a sale. Obviously you would want to spend less in order to make a profit, so by bidding 10 cents per word or phrase you would spend $10 to make a $20 sale.

Don’t forget, pay per click is only one piece of your marketing strategy, so while you may spend more using pay per click when you first start, eventually your content and hyperlinks will attract free visitors which will offset the cost per sale ratio.

Make use of content to its fullest potential. Respect your readers and writers by presenting accurate, relevant content in a way that truly informs or entertains. Learn more about your chosen topic or share your knowledge with others by communicating with CONTENT!