Perhaps one of the most important steps in the whole process. Going in without researching keywords is like going in to battle blindfolded. If you do your keyword research right, you will have a rough idea of the competition that you will be up against. Trust me my friends, don't try to take on a competitor in very fiercely contested area, I have made that mistake and trust me, the effort required is simply not worth the return. The objective is to select a niche that is not fiercely competitive but still has many search queries for it. Remember the flip side to the coin is a highly specific niche that does not generate any search queries. Find the right balance. I use Overtures Free Keyword Suggestion Tool to get a rough idea of good keywords and the number of search queries that might be expected for that keyword.
Remember the results from this tool is NOT THE EXACT COUNT. Search counts could be considerably higher or lower but the idea is to ascertain how the individual keywords COMPARE TO EACH OTHER.
A Little Tip For Adsense Publishers
If you happen to run an Adsense campaign on your website or hub it is very helpful to know how valuable your keywords are. Knowing the value of keywords can help you earn a lot of money when Google places high paying ads on your website or hub. Trust me some of these ads pay as much as $50 per click!!! The best way to do this is to sign up for an Adwords account and bid on search terms to ascertain the value of the keywords that you want to target.
SECOND STEP : ANALYZING THE COMPETITION
Now that you have got your keyword or keywords that you want to target and you know on average how many searches will be made. The next step is to establish if this keyword(s) will be easy or difficult to rank.
Let's analyze the competitive landscape. This is done by going over to Live and Yahoo search engines and checking the number of results for your keyword(s). Did you note that I did not mention Google? Focus your campaigns on Yahoo and Live because they are easier to get indexed mostly in a couple of days (unlike six months with Google). This means that you aware of any NEW competition that may be up and coming. Please note that this NEW Competition may not be listed on Google and may surprise you a bit further down the road.
If the Live and Yahoo search results number a few million, don't be disheartened, next you need to count the number entries on the first search page that have the EXACT PHRASE IN THE TITLE. If only a few of the results have the exact phrase in the title, that's the amber light, competition is light for this keyword and your ready to conquer.
Now that your waiting at the Amber light, last but not least, you need to check the number of inbound links for the top three search results. This done by adding the prefix "link:" to the name of the website. For example "link:http://www.wikipedia.org/".
Whoa, hold on a minute, do the number on inbound links number in the thousands? How are you going to compete with that? Not to worry my friends the results page is not what it seems.
Let me bust two common myths surrounding In-bound links.
Myth #1 If I have millions of random in-bound links, my website will automatically be the best and rank number 1.
Busted!!! This is false because the links all have to contain the keywords that you want to rank for, for it to be any good. For example, your site is about race cars and you have a million in-bound links whose link text is "fast cars", you will rank well for "fast cars" but not "racing cars". Remember my friends, Quality always rules over quantity. A few high quality relevant in-bound links is always better than thousands of irrelevant links.
Myth #2 People seem to think that the results of the "link:" operator is the number of links that the search engines count as in-bound links.
Busted!!! To prove that this is false, just enter a search query using the ‘link' operator for the top ranking site for a keyword such as "Tortoise Pictures" on Yahoo. Watch as Yahoo generates well over 10,000 in-bound links for this site. Whoa, that's a lot of in-bound links. But really how many of these in-bound links to this site actually contribute to the ranking of this site? Simple.
Just click on the "Advanced search" link next to the search button. Enter the ‘link' command for the site and allow Yahoo to display 100 results per page, then click search. Yahoo now shows an EVEN HIGHER number of in-bound links than before. WTF? Look for the silver lining my friends, quickly scroll down the results page and you will see that Yahoo only displays 2 or 3 search result pages. 2 or 3 pages at 100 results each? How can that make more than 10000 in-bound links? Yahoo explains why in their statement at the end of the results page.
"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already displayed."
There you have the answer, Yahoo considers over 9000 in-bound links to be duplicates. Links are considered duplicates when the domain has different pages on the same domain pointing to the same ranking page in question, Internal linking is considered duplicate in-bound links. Suddenly the competition is not that hard.
Armed with the confidence that you can take on a niche with very well researched keywords and competitor information. The next section of this Hub takes a look at on-page optimization.
THIRD STEP : ON-PAGE OPTIMISATION
On-page optimization to put it into simple words are the things that you need to do to your actual website that will enable it to get ranked. Yahoo and MSN search engines value on-page optimization more than Google. Here are a few tips on on-page optimization.
- Ensure that the domain name contains the keywords that you are going to target for.
- Make the Page Title to be the exact the keywords that you are targeting.
- Use the H1 header tag and make the very first word(s) your keyword(s).
- Following the H1 tag, start off the introductory paragraph with your keyword(s).
- If your article is very long, break it up into sections with H2 tags that contain variations of your keyword(s).
Next I make the page title "Life Insurance" along with my H1 tag. My article is pretty long so I will break up my article with H2 tags containing variations of ‘life insurance' such as "how to apply for life insurance", "life insurance do's and don'ts", life insurance advice" etc. You get the gist of it.
Remember, "Life Insurance" is just used as an example and is fiercely competitive. As mentioned before try to target less competitive keywords and the above 5 steps are all you have to do for on-page optimization. I am pretty sure you've heard so called SEO "Guru's" throw out phrases such as ‘keyword density' and ‘alt tag density'. My advice, stay well away from these as these are only useful for really competitive keywords. Remember my friends, WE ARE ONLY TARGETING LESS COMPETITIVE AREAS. Let the ‘Guru's' kill each other.
STEP FOUR : OFF-PAGE OPTIMISATION
In-bound links serve two vital purposes
- They help a site get crawled and indexed faster by search engine spiders.
- If the link text contains the keywords that you are targeting for, your site will get ranked higher based on the number of in-bound links pointing to your site
- You can pay for them
- Or you can get reciprocal links ie swap links with other sites.
As I mentioned above, I do not go after heavily contested areas, let the ‘Gurus' do that. Going into less competitive markets usually means that reciprocal linking is sufficient. Remember my friends, content is king so if your site has some quality content, visitors will naturally give you free one-way links any way FOR FREE, so why pay for these!
How to get reciprocal links?
- Run a search for the keywords that you want to target
- Next, you will have to go to each and every webpage and e-mail the webmaster with an offer to trade links
- Once you have e-mailed all the webmasters lets say the top 30, use the ‘link' command on each and every one of the top 30 websites that you have already contacted and check who links to them. E-mail these webmasters as well.
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