Keyword Tsunami

You have a good site, well respected, but you want to have one particular page/post/story get some extra attention.

Let’s pick on the Miami Herald for this particular post.

Maybe there’s a hurricane headed towards Florida and you want your coverage to be ranked at the top of the search results. You write a story or two, but neither one is really showing up where you’d like it to.

So then you decide to do a little research. You go to Google and type in what you think people are searching for. Well, already you are using an unverified opinion to make business decisions. A better first step would be to go check what people are actually searching for. You can do that by looking at Google Trends.

Now I can see that there are certain phrases that are ranking at the top. #1 is “national hurricane center miami” and #2 is “hurricane fay tracking“.

I will now try to work those phrases into the title of my page, the headline of my story and the first paragraph (if not first sentence) of the story body.

Not surprisingly, The National Ledger has a well written headline. The site is constantly writing keyword rich headlines and leads, in this case: Hurricane Fay Tracking: National Hurricane Center Tracks Fay, Projected Path.

So now we have a good headline, what about the first sentence in the story? Again I will use The National Ledger as an example:

Forecasters with the National Hurricane Center said Tropical Storm Fay mat indeed turn into Hurricane Fay and the projected path of the hurricane is right at Florida. The National Hurricane Center forecasters revealed on Monday that they believe that Fay could increase to near hurricane strength by Monday evening.

The NOAA is tracking the storm as always and while Floridians are bracing for the storm others won’t get too excited as many have the attitude that a possible category 1 hurricane is not that difficult if you have been through the storms before. Remember right now this is still classified as a Tropical Storm.

The SEO going on here is the abundance of keywords in the headline, repeated in the story lead, and if you followed the link to Google Trends, another half dozen of high ranking search phrases thrown in.

The other step a site like The Miami Herald could take is to have a “hurricane section” where all of their hurricane content can be inter-linked and remain a topic-centric section with a very specific subject. That’s a longer term way to become viewed as an expert by the search engines.

You may not have the staff do this type of research for every story/post but when you want to know how to make your story be all it can be, these steps can help you.