QUESTION: So what is the thing you need to do BEFORE you get all those inbound links?
ANSWER: You need to get your website ready for the search engines. It’s what the search engine experts call “Internal” or “On-Page” SEO (SEO means “Search Engine Optimization”). It’s the work you do on your website that makes it very easy for the search engines to figure out what your page is all about.
And once they figure out what your page is about, they’ll start ranking it higher for those search terms.
So here are two of the most important things you can do right now, on your site, to prepare for the traffic you’re about to receive (and to ultimately crank up your Search Engine Rankings as a result.)
1) Update the HTML Page titles for each of your web pages.
The HTML page title is the text that appears in the top blue bar of your browser when you’re looking at a web page. Your page title is one of the most important factors that Search Engines look at to determine the subject of your page.
They want to know what they’re looking at, too.
Lots of people ignore the page title and leave it empty, and as a result, they get poor search engine rankings. Sometimes, they’ll use the same page title for all their pages on their site, but that’s a mistake, too. (What you want is for the search engines to rank one of your pages highly for a particular term. If all your pages have the same title, then they are all competing for the same term, and the result is that none of them will rank as high for that term, all other things being equal.)
So figure out what each page is about, determine the most important and relevant keywords for that page, and set your Page Title to that keyword phrase.
2) Use good “anchor text” within your website to link from one page to another. What’s “anchor text”? It’s the word or phrase that is the actual link to your page.
So, for example, if you are linking to a page for the XYZ-1000 Widget, what you don’t want to do is have text on your page that says “Go see the XYZ-1000 Widget here, and then make the word “here” the link. Why not?
Because you’re not trying to get that page ranked for the word “here”. You want that page ranked for the search term that your traffic is using. So make the link text the entire model number, or the model number plus “widget”. THOSE are the words you want to rank highly for.
You would still say to “Go see the XYZ-1000 Widget here”, but only make “XYZ-1000 Widget” be the anchor text. Make sense?
Good, because these two tips I just shared with you are forgotten or ignored by most of your competitors. Do them now so that the search engines can read your pages easier, and rank you higher right now for your most important keywords.
It will also pay off once you get all the inbound links you’ll be building. In fact, it will help you CRUSH your competitors for your most important keywords…and that means TRAFFIC for you. And that, after all, is the point.
