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Anyone who has a clue about Search Engine Optimization knows that Google and it’s associate search engines all use keywords to index the content on the web. As someone who has practiced the ten commandments of SEO for many years, I never truly understood the extent that content-buried keywords have on your ranking. That is until I typed an article with the word ‘Cincinnati’ in it.

For a little background, Ideas and Pixels is a web design agency based out of Cincinnati, Ohio, and our target client base is the Greater Cincinnati area, thus making the most obvious hard keywords of ‘Cincinnati Web Design’ and soft ones like ‘Cincinnati Web Development Agency’ and ‘Cincinnati Based Web Designer’.

Since all articles show up as previews on the homepage, naturally ‘Cincinnati’ appeared on the front page after we published the article of which I speak. Keep in mind that the entire website uses all the normal mechanisms for SEO: Meta tags, Title Keyword Placement, Header Tag Keyword Placement, and a few others; but it lacked something. Somehow we had gotten so caught up in our clients projects that we had forgotten a key piece to our own. That piece was the use of the keywords in actual context. No where on the page did it actually say ‘Cincinnati’; it was only mentioned in the back-end code. This resulted in an average graph of our visitor activity looking like the pulse of nearly every patient on House—a flat line followed by a glimmer of hope.

During it’s first four months online, visibility of IdeasandPixels.com hovered between 5-50 visitors per day, according to Google Analytics, with most visits attributed to an Expression Engine 2 module we created two months beforehand. On Google, we were a one trick pony. Every visit seemed to stem from the term ‘Expression Engine 2 Module’, which suffice it to say isn’t the ideal keyword for getting business. But after the article was posted and the keyword ‘Cincinnati’ found it’s place on the front page, new analysis said our demographic was changing. Within two days, 65% of our visits came from the search term ‘Cincinnati Web Design’. Within four days, 75%. Today is day five and we can only speculate that growth will at least stay linear.

All because of a tiny utterance of a word nestled snugly in the middle of a ‘p’ tag.

Just something to think about.