Write good content, you might assume, and the visitors will come. Or will they? "You'd better have more of a strategy than that," says Ian Lurie at the Conversation Marketing blog. "Ian's Cynical Version of the same rule is: 'Write the right good content, and they'll eventually show up.'"

To determine what your readers are looking for, and how to help them find it with SEO, Lurie recommends a process like this:

• Use tools like Google Analytics to identify the most popular pages at your site and the keywords visitors use to reach that content. As an example, he cites a highly trafficked article from his own blog—one that outlines what customers want when they visit a website.
• Then, he suggests, "Copy the top 5-10 terms into a tool like the Google AdWords External Keywords Tool. You can delete any terms that are clearly branded. In this case, I removed '22 things you don't know about your customers,' because that's the article title. I don't need to optimize for that."
• Next, choose search terms that deliver the highest volume of quality traffic. Lurie's top phrase was "marketing strategies," and his homepage enjoyed a strong second-page ranking when he performed a Google search with the term—in other words, he stands a chance of moving to the first page with simple SEO techniques.
• Finally, optimize your site for your top terms. Lurie, for instance, modified his title tag to include the phrase "Internet Marketing Strategy" and tweaked his article by incorporating the phrase "marketing strategies" in the article's first paragraph.

The Po!nt: Says Lurie, "The real beauty of this strategy: You're just doing what your customers tell you to do. Worst case, it should improve the page's 'curb appeal' when visitors arrive."

Source: Conversation Marketing. Click here for the full post.

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