SEO – View your site through Google’s lens
If you know what SEO is, then you probably know the importance of keywords. You don’t have to litter your site with keywords that you are optimizing your site for, but it’s good to repeat the words a few times so search engines know that it’s not a passing reference. SEO lingo for this is keyword density.
A customer of ours, a spa finder service, wonders why their website is not ranking high for certain searches. They haven’t done any SEO in the past, but his site has been around for years and provides quality content.
To analyze and solve this, we did four things
1. Identify search terms that customers use
We used Google keyword tool and other services to identify common search terms for this spa finder service. Surely enough, the words ‘spa finder’ was at the top. Next step was to see if Google saw these words in our website…
2. Find out what Googlebot sees
We used Google webmaster tools to see what words Googlebot sees in their website. These were the top 5 keywords that Googlebot noticed
- spa
- locate
- massage
- home
- comfort
3. Visually check the website to see if the words ‘spa finder’ were used.
We checked the site for the words ‘spa finder’, it was mentioned, but just 4 times. Apparently, this wasn’t enough. So, we managed to add some more content around the words ‘spa finder’.
4. Finally, updated our sitemap to ask Googlebot to visit us soon.
Within a few weeks, we made peace with Googlebot as it started seeing the words ‘spa finder’. We patted ourselves on our back and moved on to other SEO tasks for our Spa Finder customer.
