5 Ways to Bait Your Search Engine Hook

Website content strategy is all about honing your bait to attract the right potential customers to your site. Keywords focused for your specific market is your search engine bait, but you need to position it to cast the widest net. You need optimum search engine rankings. Here are 5 tips to hone your bait and improve your rankings.

1. Title

It stands to reason that your title should reflect the website's subject matter. But more than that, your title has to have the keywords to hook a search engine. It's not a matter of cramming as many keywords in as possible, search engines look for a number of cues as to a site's content. Instead you want to make the title clear and concise so that the subject matter is communicated without beating people over the head with it.

2. Content

It may seem obvious, but it is crucial that your keywords appear in your content. Again, don't beat people over the head with it. You want your wording to be natural and not sound forced. A good rule of thumb is to have a keyword in your intro paragraph, when setting up the subject matter, and then at least one other time.

Write your content for the target audience while keeping your keywords in mind. That way you can write creative and interesting content that will still be caught by the search engines. And be sure to keep your keyword usage natural. If you just throw a keyword into a sentence somewhere that it sounds unnatural, Google will know and it will hurt your rankings. You can mix it up by changing tenses, numbers (singular/plural), and synonyms.

3. Know Your Niche

Make sure that all of your content is relevant to your audience. People have short attention spans, and if you have long sections that go off on other topics you're going to lose them. And the more specific your niche, the better. Specializing in a specific area gives your site more authority, which will lead to higher rankings.

4. Links

Internal links act as short cuts to other parts of your site. If your internal links are keywords, or relate semantically to keywords, it is another hook for search engines to snag on. Again, keep your usage natural and change up your keywords.

External links help establish your credibility on the web. By linking your site to another you become linked to that site in the minds of people viewing the sites. Their reputation, good or bad, becomes yours.

5. Keep What You Catch

All of this is for nothing if people just bounce from your site to another. Analytics software measures this 'Bounce Rate' and so can help you keep what you catch.