SEO Tip Series – Tip #1: The Word Cloud

Search engines drive the vast majority of web traffic – including people searching for products and services (like yours!).  If you can improve the visibility of your website on a search engine like Google, the business impact can be huge.

Unfortunately, most small business owners still do not know what SEO is and continue to treat their website and their Internet marketing strategy as an after thought.  The good news is that there are hundreds of ways that you can improve the visibility of your website and many won’t cost you anything other than a Saturday in the office.  Most SEO tips do not require much of a technical background and can be learned by anyone with ambition and interest.

The bad news is that SEO work may be easy, but much like data-entry, it is often tedious and time-consuming.  The last thing most small business owners have is extra time and when they do have extra time, where can their energy yield the best result – learning SEO or working on some other aspect of their business?  More on that later – for those business owners inclined to taking the “DIY” approach, we’ve compiled a series of tips that we are going to post over the coming weeks.

Tip#1: Use a Word Cloud tool to see how the search engines view your website

What’s a Word Cloud?

If you look down the page on this blog – on the right hand side of the screen, you’ll see a section called “Tags.”  Inside that section, you’ll see word after word with some words appearing larger and more bold than others.

Word Cloud

This whole area of words is what some call a “Word Cloud.”  Word Clouds help you visualize your website in a similar way that many of the search engines do.  Most search engine spiders cannot read images or javascript like they read plain text.

Some people are shocked when we view the text on their website in a Word Cloud and the biggest, boldest words are NOT the keywords that someone would use to find their product, service or company.

If you have a website where you are selling trains and guns, but those words are the smallest and last words in your Word Cloud, the content of your website might be hard to find when someone enters “trains and guns store” into Google.  You might never know this though if you have a website covered with pictures of trains and guns – to you, it appears obvious – “I’ve got pictures of trains and guns all over the first page of my website.  What do you mean Google can’t tell what I’m selling!?”

Again, the problem is that Google’s spider cannot always read your pretty pictures.

If you don’t have the pictures tagged with “alt” tags or “title” tags, they might as well not exist.  If you want to see this visually – use a browser like Firefox and turn off the browsers ability to display javascript and images.  Then go to your website and see what it looks like – shocking, isn’t it?

Nothing is more frustrating than spending thousands on a pretty new website only to find that the person that designed it did not consider the marketing aspects of the site.  Great web designers are NOT always adept with marketing, so don’t assume this!

So, get a tool that allows you to look at your website via a Word Cloud and then identify keywords that are missing from the cloud.  Go into your website and start adding in some quality text-based content with those keywords.  Do this on a regular basis and slowly, but surely your website’s visibility should start to increase for searches containing those keywords.

If you’d like a free demonstration of the Word Cloud, drop us a line