Everyone these days uses the Internet to do their research on you, long before they ever set foot in your club. Wouldn’t it be valuable for your health club’s Web site to appear first when someone is searching for a facility in your city? There are many ways to get ranked high on the first page of Google, but one of the best ways is to have keyword-rich, inbound anchor links.
Whoa…that sounds very techy and complicated
What it really means is, for example, when you visit an electronics review Web site and there is a blue link that says Canon Powershot, which then links to a page that has more information on buying a Canon Powershot.
The way you would use this strategy for your health club Web site is when you write an article or submit an online press release, within your article be sure to have the keywords “your city health club” or similar as a link to your site. Don’t use “click here” and don’t use only the name of your health club or your health club’s Web site address. You want to use the same keywords someone would be using to search for a health club in your city. This applies to any reciprocal or external links from online ads or links from Web sites in your community, or facebook and Google sponsored ads.
To show you the power of this, go to Google right now and search for “click here.” You’ll notice the top listing is for Adobe Acrobat. Continue to Adobe Acrobat’s Web site and you’ll also notice that nowhere on Adobe’s Web page are the words “click here.”
How can that be?
Think of all of the sites you have visited that say, “If you don’t have Adobe Acrobat, you can click here to download it for free. Even though the webpage has nothing to do with “click here,” because so many Anchor links lead back to their site, Google has them at the number one spot! See the power of anchor texts now?
The trick is to use the exact keywords that people would search when looking for a health club in your city. By having “your city health club” directed to your site, when someone searches for those keywords in a Google Search, Google will automatically give more weight to your site because those exact keywords are links to your site from other external Web sites.
For example, “XYZ Fitness is well known as the best health club in Simpsonville and the only fitness center that delivers guaranteed results.” Now when someone searches the key words “health clubs in Simpsonville,” you’ll be at the top. Google has a very complex algorithm that no one has quite figured out; however, having external links like this have proven to be one way to get Google’s attention, often within just a few hours.
I hope I didn’t lose you because this is one of the best strategies to get your Web site ranked VERY high in the natural listings on Google. Simply stated, come up with a list of all of the keywords you feel people in your city will search for when looking for solution to their fitness needs. Then use those keywords within online articles, press releases, or any time you have another site linking back to your Web site. Google will take care of the rest!
Curtis Mock is an author, speaker and consultant to health clubs worldwide. He is the Executive Director of GymSuccess.com.
Curtis,
Great article on a simple yet powerful SEO strategy. While Google takes great pains to keep how they determine website ranking a secret (they called it “Relevance”), experience has taught successful online marketers like yourself that inbound links — links that point to your website from other websites — are a HUGE contributor to a website’s Relevance.
Another easy (and free!) way for readers to utilize this is in websites like this one. Commenting in a way that contributes to the conversation topic then including a link to your website costs nothing and adds to those inbound links that Google measures.
Good stuff.