Aligning Keywords and Pages – Extreme SEO Makeover

Here’s another installment of my recent “Extreme SEO Makeover” seminar into blog form project. (The Labor Day holiday threw off my editorial schedule; we should be back on track next week.) Last time focused on measuring our status in rankings and traffic. Now we’re returning to our keyword research list and delving into the web pages to make sure they match up.

Ranking For Your Keywords

Ranking magic and search engines

So you have a list of keywords that you want to rank well for in the search engines. How do you do that? Well, I can tell you how to NOT do that:

SEO Rule #1: You can’t rank for keywords you don’t have on your website.

(OK, you can rank for keywords you don’t have on your website, but it’s really really hard and doesn’t work well for competitive keywords and really not worth it unless you’re trying to pull a prank or something.)

Seriously, I’ve had clients ask me why they aren’t ranking for keywords that don’t appear anywhere on their website. Not in metadata, not in page names, not in content. Not in anything and not anywhere. How do they expect to rank for the keyword if it isn’t on their website – magic?

Keywords and Pages

Drag out your handy SEO spreadsheet, the one with the keywords on it, and add a URL column. This will be the page that best matches up with that keyword. Go through your list and start matching. (If you find that a page could be a good match if it had some better content, put that URL in the spreadsheet and color it yellow so you know to come back and fix the page content later.)

When you’re done, you’ll have three kinds of keyword results:

1. Keywords that match up with pages
2. Keywords that could match up with pages if they had better content
3. Keywords that don’t match up with any pages

For the first batch of keywords, you’re golden. For the second batch, of course you’ll want to fix up the content on those pages that need it. You’ll also want to create pages for that third batch of orphaned keywords, because unless you’re Harry Potter you’re not going to rank for those keywords EVER.

Extreme SEO Makeover blog series

• Seminar Feedback
• Introduction to Extreme SEO Makeover
• Identify your Keywords
• Keyword Research
• Measuring your Status
• Aligning Keywords and Pages
• Optimizing Pages
• Trust but Verify
• Conclusions

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