If you’re familiar with the small business marketing automation process, you probably know that creating fresh content relevant to the keywords you’re targeting is the best way to improve your search engine rankings and attract links to your site from credible websites.  Many businesses that are starting out with an inbound marketing program stuff keywords throughout their website and in their content without taking into account how the content appears to the user.

Google’s Matt Cutts recently announced that the new Google search engine algorithm would penalize websites that favor Search Engine Optimization over providing fresh, relevant content to its visitors.  At the March 2012 SXSW event, Cutts said, “What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO?  We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks.  We are trying to level the playing field a bit.  All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great sites.  We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.  We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

What does this mean for you?  Should you stop trying to optimize your website for search engines?  The answer to this question is absolutely not!  Your first objective should always be to create content that is interesting to the readers that you are targeting.  In order to do this, the first thing you need to do is to define who your target audience(s) is.  For example, if you are targeting IT managers with your content, you should know their demographic traits as well as their wants and needs.  Everything you should create for this target market should take these factors into account. 

Here are a few tips for optimizing your website and marketing content for SEO as Google cracks down on “over-optimizing” SEO:

• For each page on your website, target no more than two keyword phrases per page.  You can use these keyword phrases in the page titles, headers and the page content, but you should use them “organically” – in other words, use them so it is not apparent to the reader that you’re trying to have them noticed by search engines.

• In your blog posts, eBooks and whitepapers, your keyword density should be 0.5% to 1.5%.  In other words, you should use your keyword phrases once every two to three paragraphs.  Regardless of how often you use them, you should use them “organically.”

• A great way to have your keywords noticed by search engines is to produce relevant content frequently.  For example, rather than stuffing your keyword phrases 3 times into a blog post, write 3 blog posts that include the keyword phrases once per post.

• Use “long-tail” keyword phrases to produce highly targeted search engine results.  For example, instead of using “bed and breakfast inns”, use “Snohomish County bed and breakfast inns.”  People searching for those “long-tail” keyword phrases are highly qualified leads.

While it’s important to be aware of what Google is doing for those websites that are “over-optimizing” for SEO, it’s much more important to produce interesting content for your site visitors.  Keep producing this content and use best practices for SEO and you’re well on your way to creating an inbound lead generation machine!