SEO for Crafters - Part 2

In part 2 of SEO for Crafters I’ll show you what you can do with those keywords you’ve spent so much time researching.

How many keywords did you come up with? It’s honestly only reasonable to be able to optimize for 5-10 words or phrases. But don’t worry if you came up with a list of 50 or more, your work wasn’t in vain. If the words and phrases on your list are related you can pull from them now and again to keep things fresh. You may also decide to optimize specific pages for different words.

To optimize your website or blog for a word or phrase means to use it in key places that allow search engines to find that word on your site. You probably have a friend who uses the same expression over and over again like “cool beans,” or “totally, man.” When you hear that expression you can’t help but think of them. Optimizing has a similar effect. You will strategically use words and phrases repeatedly in your text and titles. The more you do this the more search engines will associate your website with those words. The search engines are looking in five main areas: titles, descriptions, main copy, links, and urls, to find those keywords.

Titles and Descriptions

Search engines place higher importance on words that are formatted as headings and titles, so use your keywords in titles and headings for your pages. To have the full impact you can’t just bold the text or make it bigger you need to format it as a heading or title.

If you use a platform for your website that does behind the scenes coding for you, you probably have optional fields for descriptions, both for pages and posts. I recommend filling them in. The descriptions should read like normal text as they will be seen on the search page below the link to your site. If you have a compelling, to-the-point description it will help entice people to choose your link over others.

Main Copy

The main text of your website is also ranked, but not as high as titles. First and foremost use natural language, you want people to be engaged with your text so they read it all, come back for more and even share it. But do keep that list of keywords in mind and pepper the words you’re focusing on throughout the text. This may mean that your website in general is optimized for one phrase while specific articles are optimized for different, but related phrases.

Links

Links are important for many reasons, but in this context you want to link specific words in your main text to a related article on another website. So from this point on no more “click here”, instead use keywords to describe what you’re linking to. For example at the bottom of this post there’s a link to a cheat sheet for all this keyword information, I use the words, “using keywords in SEO” as a link not “illustrated cheat sheet” because they’re more specific and descriptive.

URL

You should have control over the urls for your pages and individual posts. Make use of keywords here too. Don’t ever settle for the default random number that’s generated with some blogging platforms. If your platform generates a url from your title that’s great because you’re already using keywords, however you might want to tweak it to either make it shorter or really focus on the right words.

All of this boils down to is having a few words or phrases that are descriptive of what your website is about and using them in a natural, organic way in the titles and text of your site.

To help you with this week’s tips here’s an illustrated cheat sheet for using keywords in SEO.

Next week we’ll focus on authority, the final part to SEO for Crafters.

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I encourage comments directly to this post, but also feel free to email me directly with questions, reactions, struggles, etc. genevieve@lightboxsf.com

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