Welcome to the latest edition of my new weekly blog series, “Free Marketing Ideas”. Each week I will identify and explain a simple marketing idea that you can employ at low or no cost. Last week’s topic was Parts 1-10 Roundup.

This Week’s Topic = Keywords and Copy

Two weeks ago, I posted about how to use Alt tags and Meta data to improve your website and make it more likely to rank highly in Google and other search engines. Today, we expand on that topic a bit.

What sophisticated search engines are looking for when they are returning results for someone’s search is the content of your site, and how closely it matches what the searcher is looking for. They have to use a lot of fancy algorithms and tools to make that determination. And by using the right content on your site (meaning the actual text you or someone has written for the website), you can tell search engines to rank you first.

Step 1 is to identify the keywords or keyword phrases that people looking for you might search. For example, if I operate an event planning business in Trenton, NJ, I might want to rank highly for terms such as “new jersey event planner”, “Trenton events”, or “planning a corporate event”.

If you use Google Analytics or another website analytics tool, you should also be able to get a full list of the actual keywords that people are using when they come to your site.

Once you have a full list, you want to do a full audit of your site. Are you using those keywords often enough? Are they on the right pages, pages you want to show up for those specific searches?

Rewrite your pages to make sure these keywords are included in headings and titles, as well as scattered throughout the text. The key here is to find the right balance, so that you are not “keyword stuffing”, or loading your page with keywords in an attempt to game the system. You want to use keywords appropriately to tell Google and the other search engines what your site is about.

When you have rewritten the text on your site to better showcase the keywords that people are actually searching for when they find you, you will find that more searches will get to your site. That’s SEO 101.

Share your thoughts on this idea, and other free marketing ideas in the comments section below and keep the conversation going!