When thinking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) there are an endless number of ways to improve your website for various search engines. But your main strategy should focus nailing down specific keywords and phrases that relate to your business (and website content) and mapping them to appropriate pages in your site – without this, SEO is pointless.

As you’ve probably heard “content is king”, and it’s true. More pages of content are going to be better than less. Websites that have only 8 pages of good content will usually have a tougher time getting traffic and better ranking than that of a website with 16. It makes sense – having more pages broadens the opportunity that searchers will find you based on a wider range of keyword possibilities. For example, let’s say you target 2 keywords per page. In this example, one website is targeting 16 keywords while the other is targeting 32. See how the numbers can quickly grow?

An important but overlooked area to take advantage of SEO is with website and webpage URLs. Have you ever seen a web page with an Http address such as yourwebsite.com/page/page.aspx?ID=4278asg while browsing? It’s entirely too common and those types of addresses are not search engine friendly (SEF). On top of that, you lose potential keyword targeting when all you have is a number or ID that doesn’t help to describe the page content in any way, shape or form. Now, if those website URLs were like yourwebsite.com/services/website-copywriting.aspx you’re now allowing search engines to rank you higher.

URL addresses are an excellent and important place to add your keywords for each page of your website. If a specific page is meant to target “social media consulting” you might have your address for that specific page as “yourwebsite.com/social-media/social-media-consulting.html” – search engines will read the keywords in that URL. As long as you use the same keyword in the page title, description, and a few times within the content, you’ll be setting yourself up for success rather than failure. Getting this part of the SEO equation right early on is certainly better than having to go back later and adjust it.

Take a look at your website URLs, evaluate each page and the targeted keywords, and determine if you need some adjusting.

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