Butterflies are my favourite insect, when I see a butterfly I admire the creature above all other insects… not only because of its sheer beauty, not because it has the freedom to fly and land wherever it wishes, but because of the entire journey it undertakes to shape into its true form.
Imagine your website a developing cocoon; it is the unique shell to a source of greatness within, the egg has been planted but all cocoons must go through a metamorphosis.
Metamorphosis is the name we use to describe a rapid transformation, in order for a website to transform and be optimised to its full potential; we must remember the importance of keywords. In using keywords to fine tune content within your web pages, it attains a better ranking on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN amongst many others.
There are four stages to a metamorphosis:
STAGE ONE: The egg, in this case your website is your egg. It has been created and now the transformation will take place.
STAGE TWO: Larva AKA ‘The Caterpillar’, the caterpillar is a hungry chap, think of him as a hungry search engine. Keywords are the food of your web pages enabling these terms to link to the correct path feeding a search engine and connecting it to your site. However avoid stuffing your site with keywords as you may be penalised for this even if the content does make sense.
Keywords are a great tool to help your visitors find your site, even if your site already achieves great search engine rankings, this does not mean that you will entice the correct traffic. If you select the wrong keywords you could be attracting the wrong audience, causing the caterpillar digestion problems, which in turn means less conversions if they are not interested in your business… and you don’t want to end up with a hungry caterpillar!
STAGE THREE: The Pupa, The Caterpillar cleverly forms a protective shield called Pupa when it has finished growing. Most of the transformation takes place inside Pupa, in this analogy here takes place a process we will call this the Keyword Research Process.
- Google will read your site from left to right, from top to bottom so the first blocks of text are the most important.
- You need to discover your keywords: Focus on a large range of possible keywords related to your website and audience.
- Analyze your keywords: Look at your competition to see what terms they are ranking for and how many pages are indexed; this may have an impact on your search terms.
- Select your keywords: Short list your keywords keeping in mind your target audience and relevance to your site. This research helps to drive more traffic to your site bringing higher conversions from keyword targeted traffic.
- Bear in mind when eliminating keywords from your short list, the page ranking, competition and the popularity of the search term.
STAGE FOUR: Once you have the foundations and the caterpillar has finished transforming or digesting his meal, the pupa will hatch; a beautiful butterfly takes its first flight.
Now you have your Keywords feeding the search engine, and from this a butterfly has emerged, next comes the destination, the top places to land these keywords are within the:
- Body Text
- Page title
- Heading
- First 25 words on the page
- In the URL
- Within links
- META tags
- Anchor text
- Attributes
Keywords can be determined by their density, this is the rate of how many keyword or keyword phrases appear on your web page. Keyword density is usually ranked per page not the overall site, so naturally some pages will rank higher than others. When applying your keywords to a destination page, by producing quality original content, search engines will give you a better ranking for your chosen keywords and phrases. Make sure your butterfly is strong enough to take flight!
Search Engines explore keywords through Spiders (not the insect kind!) that determine how related your content is to a particular keyword through density and placement.
So try it for yourself, or get a qualified company such as Leapfrogg to do it for you! Frogs work well with butterflies! Watch your website grow wings and take flight!