What we have covered up to this point is what is called on page optimization. This means that all the things that we have done were directly done to our web pages. Now we are going to move into the area of off page optimization, which is actually where the majority of your optimization techniques come to play. The truth is, all the on page optimization in the world isn’t going to bring you to the top of the search engines without off page optimization. So let’s dive into that aspect of SEO right now.
Off page optimization literally mean the difference between your page ranking 1000 or ranking 1 on Google. Yes, the difference can be that great.
Off page optimization is just that. It is all the factors that add to your search engine rankings that don’t appear on your web page.
One of these is which websites link to you. The more websites that you have linking to your website, the higher your ranking. Not only are the number of the websites important but the quality of them as well. This also included the PR rank of each of these websites. The higher the better.
On each website that links to you there is then the number of links that link to your site. The more links, the better. The type of links is also important as some links are worth more than others. Also it is important that the site that has all these links to your site is considered a quality site in the eyes of Google.
This is the basic stuff that we’re going to concentrate on. There’s more, but we’ll get to that later on. Don’t worry. By the time we’re done, you’ll have all the main pieces put together. It’s just a matter of connecting the dots and crossing all the T’s.
In order to understand how to get our site up to the top of the search engines using off page optimization, we need to first look at the top 10 sites in our niche and see how they got to where they are through the same methods. We basically want to do what they did but then take it one step farther.
The first step is to take one of the sites in your niche that is ranked up at the top of Google and do what we call a link check. To do this, go to the Google search engine and in the box where you would type in your search phrase, type in the following:
link:http://www.domain.com/
You will of course replace the www.domain.com with the actual URL of the web site that you are looking up.
After you do this, you will see which websites link to this site.
Let’s stop right here. From this point, there are a number of things that you are going to need to check for each site that links in to the site you’re trying to beat out. So we’ll stop here and save all of that for our next articles, because here is where things start to get a little intense and possibly a little confusing as well.
Wednesday, 23 May 2007
Tuesday, 22 May 2007
SEO Part 7
Sorry for the delay in posting part 7. I have been tied up on a few other projects which took up more time than i had intended. Here`s part 7
So, want to get listed on Google in under 24 hours? It is possible. I’m going to show you how in this article. So many people think that this stuff is as much voodoo as the "weight loss spells" web page. But the truth is, a lot of this is just pure common sense and realizing what it is that Google wants and simply giving it to them. That’s how I was able to defeat things like the Google Slap. But that’s another story. Anyway, let’s move on to how to get listed in Google in under 24 hours.
Okay, let’s say you make a brand new website for yourself. Let’s call it mynewwebsite.com for the sake of keeping this simple.
If we were to type that website into Google’s search box we would find that it’s not listed. The reason is because it is brand new and Google hasn’t had a chance to go out and find us yet so that they can actually list us. Okay, so how do we get indexed by Google?
Well, let me tell you what NOT to do, because this is the kind of stuff that’s going to get you in a mess of trouble.
Don’t EVER use the Google online submission form for your site. This is a form where you tell Google you have a site and ask them to list you. Guess what? If you do this, it’s going to take about 4 to 6 weeks to get your site listed. That’s a far cry from 24 hours. So don’t use the form. There’s a better way.
Simply do a search for websites in your keyword and see if they have a links page. If they do, look to see if the site is a PR 6 or higher site. If it is, write them a very professional email asking them if they would agree to a link exchange. If you do this correctly, they should have no problem agreeing to one. This will get your website indexed in under 24 hours.
Why?
Because the page that’s linking to you is a very high ranking page, and Google takes those pages very serious. They also take the links on those pages very seriously. So, when Google sees YOUR link on that page, they will immediately look to see if you’re indexed with them. If you’re not, they will index you immediately. How does this happen in under 24 hours? Because the Googlebots are out there everyday. So as soon as the new day begins, they start their crawl. As soon as they see the PR 6 page with your link on it, you’re as good as in.
It’s that simple.
If you can manage to do this with a number of websites, this will bring you up the search engine ranks. Again, this is only a piece of the puzzle, but it’s an important piece. It’s called getting backlinks.
So, want to get listed on Google in under 24 hours? It is possible. I’m going to show you how in this article. So many people think that this stuff is as much voodoo as the "weight loss spells" web page. But the truth is, a lot of this is just pure common sense and realizing what it is that Google wants and simply giving it to them. That’s how I was able to defeat things like the Google Slap. But that’s another story. Anyway, let’s move on to how to get listed in Google in under 24 hours.
Okay, let’s say you make a brand new website for yourself. Let’s call it mynewwebsite.com for the sake of keeping this simple.
If we were to type that website into Google’s search box we would find that it’s not listed. The reason is because it is brand new and Google hasn’t had a chance to go out and find us yet so that they can actually list us. Okay, so how do we get indexed by Google?
Well, let me tell you what NOT to do, because this is the kind of stuff that’s going to get you in a mess of trouble.
Don’t EVER use the Google online submission form for your site. This is a form where you tell Google you have a site and ask them to list you. Guess what? If you do this, it’s going to take about 4 to 6 weeks to get your site listed. That’s a far cry from 24 hours. So don’t use the form. There’s a better way.
Simply do a search for websites in your keyword and see if they have a links page. If they do, look to see if the site is a PR 6 or higher site. If it is, write them a very professional email asking them if they would agree to a link exchange. If you do this correctly, they should have no problem agreeing to one. This will get your website indexed in under 24 hours.
Why?
Because the page that’s linking to you is a very high ranking page, and Google takes those pages very serious. They also take the links on those pages very seriously. So, when Google sees YOUR link on that page, they will immediately look to see if you’re indexed with them. If you’re not, they will index you immediately. How does this happen in under 24 hours? Because the Googlebots are out there everyday. So as soon as the new day begins, they start their crawl. As soon as they see the PR 6 page with your link on it, you’re as good as in.
It’s that simple.
If you can manage to do this with a number of websites, this will bring you up the search engine ranks. Again, this is only a piece of the puzzle, but it’s an important piece. It’s called getting backlinks.
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
SEO - Part 6
In our last article we said that we would start off with how to get the good old Googlebots to read our keywords first. This is very important towards getting a high search engine ranking. If you only get this one concept out of this whole tutorial, you will still be ahead of the game against most of the people on the Internet who put up web pages and have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. Knowledge is power and you’re about to get an education and a half in just this one article.
Okay, remember I said that Google reads your web page from left to right? Well, that’s not entirely true. There is one exception to this rule.
Did you ever go to a web page and see down the left hand column of the page a bunch of navigation links? Well, in this case, Google will read the navigation links down the left hand side before it reads anything else. So this is the exception to the left to right rule.
How does this help us?
Well, what we don’t want is for Google to read the navigation links first. We want them to read the content of our site first. The way we trick them to do this is simple. On top of the navigation links on the left hand side we simply put an empty column. When Google sees this they will see that it is an empty column and then proceed to read our content to the right of it before going down to the navigation links under the empty column.
Not a bad little trick. And it is very effective too.
One thing I want to point out. The few things we’ve gone over so far are only a fraction of the number of things you’ll have to do in order to get a good search engine ranking. In other words, don’t expect to just do the first few things we’ve discussed and expect your search engine rankings to skyrocket. You have to do ALL the things in this tutorial if you want to win the search engine wars. And that means not leaving anything out.
Okay, remember I said that Google reads your web page from left to right? Well, that’s not entirely true. There is one exception to this rule.
Did you ever go to a web page and see down the left hand column of the page a bunch of navigation links? Well, in this case, Google will read the navigation links down the left hand side before it reads anything else. So this is the exception to the left to right rule.
How does this help us?
Well, what we don’t want is for Google to read the navigation links first. We want them to read the content of our site first. The way we trick them to do this is simple. On top of the navigation links on the left hand side we simply put an empty column. When Google sees this they will see that it is an empty column and then proceed to read our content to the right of it before going down to the navigation links under the empty column.
Not a bad little trick. And it is very effective too.
One thing I want to point out. The few things we’ve gone over so far are only a fraction of the number of things you’ll have to do in order to get a good search engine ranking. In other words, don’t expect to just do the first few things we’ve discussed and expect your search engine rankings to skyrocket. You have to do ALL the things in this tutorial if you want to win the search engine wars. And that means not leaving anything out.
Thursday, 26 April 2007
SEO Part 5
In our last article we left off with the h1 tag ad how it should look for your web page. In this article we’re going to pick up with the h2 tag and a few other things we can do to make Google like us enough to put us close to the top of the search engines. By the time we’re done, you’re going to have one of the top sites for your niche.
The h2 tag is a sub header. In the case of "Weight Loss Spells" you might want to have a sub header something like this…
"Safe Weight Loss Spells That Work"
You will notice that in our sub header we also have the keyword of the page we’re optimizing. This is another plus for us. One word of caution. You don’t want to "keyword stuff" your page. This will actually hurt your web page with the search engines. Keyword stuffing is simply listing your main keywords over and over on the page. Search engines will pick up on this and really knock you down for it. So don’t do it.
This brings us to how you actually should have your keywords appear throughout your page.
Search engines rank pages based on what real people want. And what real people want is to read something that actually sounds like it was written for a real person.
The best way to illustrate this is with an example of how you would write a paragraph for your web page using the main keywords. Notice the highlighted keywords and how they’re "sprinkled" throughout the paragraph.
Weight Loss Spells have always been a mystery to modern science. Many dismiss it as just voodoo. Others find it fascinating table talk. But few take it seriously. The truth is, weight loss spells when performed by a qualified professional, can actually help a person who otherwise could not lose weight do so with relative ease. If you’re interested in some proven weight loss spells that work, you will find them in our spells section of the site.
See how natural that sounded? That’s the kind of page you want to put up. Yes, it takes a little bit of thought and it does help to be a decent writer. But if you can’t do it yourself, get somebody who can. There are plenty of good copywriters out there who can put together a page for you that will be optimized perfectly for the search engines.
In our next article, we’re going to continue our discussion of SEO with tricks on how to get Google to read your keywords first. This is so important because let’s face it, keywords are the name of the game. They’re what Internet surfers type in when they go to a search engine. Without keyword optimization, you’re fighting a war that you can’t win. If it sounds like I am repeating myself, I am for a reason. Sometimes we need to have something drilled home before we really understand how important the concept is.
The h2 tag is a sub header. In the case of "Weight Loss Spells" you might want to have a sub header something like this…
"Safe Weight Loss Spells That Work"
You will notice that in our sub header we also have the keyword of the page we’re optimizing. This is another plus for us. One word of caution. You don’t want to "keyword stuff" your page. This will actually hurt your web page with the search engines. Keyword stuffing is simply listing your main keywords over and over on the page. Search engines will pick up on this and really knock you down for it. So don’t do it.
This brings us to how you actually should have your keywords appear throughout your page.
Search engines rank pages based on what real people want. And what real people want is to read something that actually sounds like it was written for a real person.
The best way to illustrate this is with an example of how you would write a paragraph for your web page using the main keywords. Notice the highlighted keywords and how they’re "sprinkled" throughout the paragraph.
Weight Loss Spells have always been a mystery to modern science. Many dismiss it as just voodoo. Others find it fascinating table talk. But few take it seriously. The truth is, weight loss spells when performed by a qualified professional, can actually help a person who otherwise could not lose weight do so with relative ease. If you’re interested in some proven weight loss spells that work, you will find them in our spells section of the site.
See how natural that sounded? That’s the kind of page you want to put up. Yes, it takes a little bit of thought and it does help to be a decent writer. But if you can’t do it yourself, get somebody who can. There are plenty of good copywriters out there who can put together a page for you that will be optimized perfectly for the search engines.
In our next article, we’re going to continue our discussion of SEO with tricks on how to get Google to read your keywords first. This is so important because let’s face it, keywords are the name of the game. They’re what Internet surfers type in when they go to a search engine. Without keyword optimization, you’re fighting a war that you can’t win. If it sounds like I am repeating myself, I am for a reason. Sometimes we need to have something drilled home before we really understand how important the concept is.
Tuesday, 24 April 2007
SEO Part 4
Picking up where we left off in the last article, we’re now going to move on to the next chapter in Brad’s book. I’ve left a lot of stuff out of the first chapter that I felt wasn’t really needed for the purpose of this article series. No sense getting you all confused.
In this article, we’re actually going to begin the optimization of our web page. This is a systematic, step by step approach, so you should be able to take this approach and apply it to any web site at all and not just the one we’re doing in this example.
The first thing you need to do is select a page title for your site. The title should ONLY include your keyword phrase that you want optimized. So, if we’re putting together a web site for "weight loss spells" that’s going to be our title, PERIOD. Not "Great Weight Loss Spells" or "Amazing Weight Loss Spells" but just "Weight Loss Spells." If we want to call it "Great Weight Loss Spells" then we have to go back and start the process all over again, starting with Wordtracker, finding the number of searches and then going to Google and finding the number of competing sites, as well as what the top sites are. Every keyword MUST be optimized separately. Sounds like a lot of work? Nobody said SEO was easy.
Now, having said that, if you were to do something like this for the title…
"Weight Loss Spells – Safe Weight Loss"
That would be acceptable. Not perfect, but acceptable. You won’t get as much weight from Google if you just used "Weight Loss Spells" but because the main keyword phrase is in the title, you will get some weight for it. In other words the fewer the words the better.
The next thing we want to do is create the heading for our page. This is going to be the first thing they see and unless it is a graphic header, you want the header of your page to be in a h1 tag. Leaving this out can be hazardous to your health.
In the h1 tag is going to be the actual heading for your page, which should be "Weight Loss Spells" and that’s it, unless of course you want to go with the alternate title that we mentioned above.
Because of the way that Google reads web pages when they send their Googlebots around, you want your h1 tag to be as far to the left of the page as possible. Why? Because Googlebots read from left to right. Having the h1 tag too far right will hurt your SE rankings.
In our next article, we’ll continue with sub header tags like the h2 tag. We’ll also show you how to make Google read your keywords first. Like I said, this is some pretty complex stuff and there’s a lot to go over. That’s why we’re breaking this tutorial up into sections. Otherwise you would definitely suffer from information overload.
In this article, we’re actually going to begin the optimization of our web page. This is a systematic, step by step approach, so you should be able to take this approach and apply it to any web site at all and not just the one we’re doing in this example.
The first thing you need to do is select a page title for your site. The title should ONLY include your keyword phrase that you want optimized. So, if we’re putting together a web site for "weight loss spells" that’s going to be our title, PERIOD. Not "Great Weight Loss Spells" or "Amazing Weight Loss Spells" but just "Weight Loss Spells." If we want to call it "Great Weight Loss Spells" then we have to go back and start the process all over again, starting with Wordtracker, finding the number of searches and then going to Google and finding the number of competing sites, as well as what the top sites are. Every keyword MUST be optimized separately. Sounds like a lot of work? Nobody said SEO was easy.
Now, having said that, if you were to do something like this for the title…
"Weight Loss Spells – Safe Weight Loss"
That would be acceptable. Not perfect, but acceptable. You won’t get as much weight from Google if you just used "Weight Loss Spells" but because the main keyword phrase is in the title, you will get some weight for it. In other words the fewer the words the better.
The next thing we want to do is create the heading for our page. This is going to be the first thing they see and unless it is a graphic header, you want the header of your page to be in a h1 tag. Leaving this out can be hazardous to your health.
In the h1 tag is going to be the actual heading for your page, which should be "Weight Loss Spells" and that’s it, unless of course you want to go with the alternate title that we mentioned above.
Because of the way that Google reads web pages when they send their Googlebots around, you want your h1 tag to be as far to the left of the page as possible. Why? Because Googlebots read from left to right. Having the h1 tag too far right will hurt your SE rankings.
In our next article, we’ll continue with sub header tags like the h2 tag. We’ll also show you how to make Google read your keywords first. Like I said, this is some pretty complex stuff and there’s a lot to go over. That’s why we’re breaking this tutorial up into sections. Otherwise you would definitely suffer from information overload.
Monday, 23 April 2007
SEO - PART 3
Okay we just picked out the keyword that we’re going to target, "weight loss spells." Okay, if you take a look at Google’s top pages for that keyword, you will notice something very important. The number 2 site in the index is not a main page. It’s a subpage. Why does that matter?
Subpages are not ranked as high as main pages by the search engines. A main page will always get preferential treatment over a subpage. So, since the number 2 page in the Google listings for this keyword is a subpage, we have a very good chance of knocking it out of the number 2 spot if we target our own main page with the keyword "weight loss spells."
If you go to that page and take a look at its page rank, you’ll see that it only has a page rank of 2. This is not very high at all and yet it’s still the number 2 ranked page for this keyword.
This is going to be a piece of cake.
Oh, in case you don’t understand page rank, let me give you a quick and dirty explanation. Page rank is the way Google gives a value to a web site. The higher the page rank, the more popular. So, a page rank of 6 is better than a page rank of 2. The way this page rank is determined is by the number of links on other sites that point to your site.
So why is this a piece of cake? Simple. A page rank of 2 is nothing. We should be able to knock off a page rank of 2 in no time flat, thus bringing us up to at least the second position on Google.
Okay, let’s go back to the number 2 site on Google and look up the keywords that this site uses. Easy to do. Just go to the top of your browser and click on "view" and then "source." If you look through the source, you should see 2 lines that looks like this.
title Weight Loss Spells - Free Spells for Losing Weight title
meta name="keywords" content="witchcraft, Wicca, Wiccan, spells, love spells, free spells"
There is something very interesting about this site and how it is optimized.
It’s not.
Look closely. The title of the site does have the keyword "weight loss spells" in it. But if you look at the keywords line, you’ll see that nowhere in that line do they have "weight loss spells." This is a major boo-boo and yet they still managed to land at the number 2 position at Google for this keyword. All we have to do is include the keyword "weight loss spells" in our keyword line for our site and we’ve already got an advantage over them.
Another thing you will notice is their header tags. There are none. A header tag is a piece of HTML that starts either h1, h2, etc. This site has only one h1 header tags on the page. That’s another plus on our favor. All we have to do is include an H1 tag on our web page and that at least puts us on the same level as them.
For those who don’t know what header tags are, they’re HTML tags that tell a person’s browser to print this as a heading, meaning it will be larger in type than the rest of the print under it.
For example:
This Is A Heading Of A Page
And this is the smaller print that goes under it.
So as you can see, we have quite a few things we can do already to push our site above this site in the search engines.
Let’s take a look to see if the keyword "weight loss spells" is bolded anywhere on the page. The only place it’s bolded is in the h1 tag itself. Nowhere else on the page does this keyword appear at all.
That is totally mind boggling that this site is number 2 at Google under this keyword and yet on their page the keyword itself is only listed one time.
And, did you happen to take a look at how horrible this page is as far as design? How many people do you think would go to a site like this and actually stay there long? One can only imagine how bad the sites are that are under this site. If we were to put up a quality site, fully optimized for this keyword, there is no reason and just no way we can’t reach the number 2 position, minimum.
Based on all the things we’ve learned about this site for this keyword, based on the way that Google ranks pages, we should easily be able to outrank this site, which only has a page rank of 2.
Now, what we just did with this web site, we should do for the top 5 web sites on the search page of Google. If all the top sites turn out to be this poorly constructed and have low page ranks, then we should have no trouble knocking them all down.
Subpages are not ranked as high as main pages by the search engines. A main page will always get preferential treatment over a subpage. So, since the number 2 page in the Google listings for this keyword is a subpage, we have a very good chance of knocking it out of the number 2 spot if we target our own main page with the keyword "weight loss spells."
If you go to that page and take a look at its page rank, you’ll see that it only has a page rank of 2. This is not very high at all and yet it’s still the number 2 ranked page for this keyword.
This is going to be a piece of cake.
Oh, in case you don’t understand page rank, let me give you a quick and dirty explanation. Page rank is the way Google gives a value to a web site. The higher the page rank, the more popular. So, a page rank of 6 is better than a page rank of 2. The way this page rank is determined is by the number of links on other sites that point to your site.
So why is this a piece of cake? Simple. A page rank of 2 is nothing. We should be able to knock off a page rank of 2 in no time flat, thus bringing us up to at least the second position on Google.
Okay, let’s go back to the number 2 site on Google and look up the keywords that this site uses. Easy to do. Just go to the top of your browser and click on "view" and then "source." If you look through the source, you should see 2 lines that looks like this.
title Weight Loss Spells - Free Spells for Losing Weight title
meta name="keywords" content="witchcraft, Wicca, Wiccan, spells, love spells, free spells"
There is something very interesting about this site and how it is optimized.
It’s not.
Look closely. The title of the site does have the keyword "weight loss spells" in it. But if you look at the keywords line, you’ll see that nowhere in that line do they have "weight loss spells." This is a major boo-boo and yet they still managed to land at the number 2 position at Google for this keyword. All we have to do is include the keyword "weight loss spells" in our keyword line for our site and we’ve already got an advantage over them.
Another thing you will notice is their header tags. There are none. A header tag is a piece of HTML that starts either h1, h2, etc. This site has only one h1 header tags on the page. That’s another plus on our favor. All we have to do is include an H1 tag on our web page and that at least puts us on the same level as them.
For those who don’t know what header tags are, they’re HTML tags that tell a person’s browser to print this as a heading, meaning it will be larger in type than the rest of the print under it.
For example:
This Is A Heading Of A Page
And this is the smaller print that goes under it.
So as you can see, we have quite a few things we can do already to push our site above this site in the search engines.
Let’s take a look to see if the keyword "weight loss spells" is bolded anywhere on the page. The only place it’s bolded is in the h1 tag itself. Nowhere else on the page does this keyword appear at all.
That is totally mind boggling that this site is number 2 at Google under this keyword and yet on their page the keyword itself is only listed one time.
And, did you happen to take a look at how horrible this page is as far as design? How many people do you think would go to a site like this and actually stay there long? One can only imagine how bad the sites are that are under this site. If we were to put up a quality site, fully optimized for this keyword, there is no reason and just no way we can’t reach the number 2 position, minimum.
Based on all the things we’ve learned about this site for this keyword, based on the way that Google ranks pages, we should easily be able to outrank this site, which only has a page rank of 2.
Now, what we just did with this web site, we should do for the top 5 web sites on the search page of Google. If all the top sites turn out to be this poorly constructed and have low page ranks, then we should have no trouble knocking them all down.
Saturday, 21 April 2007
SEO - Part 2
Okay, let’s dive right into SEO from the beginning. That would be with your niche. The biggest mistake that people make when trying to do SEO is that they don’t bother to do research on their niche first to see what kind of demand there is for it and how much competition they have. They pretty much dive right in only to find out later that they are going against 19 million pages in that niche and only 2,000 monthly searches. Good luck trying to win this search engine war.
Wake me when you’ve reached your 100th birthday.
Brad Cullen’s first chapter of his free giveaway book (it’s nice to be so rich that you can just give stuff away) was called "Optimize the Wrong Keywords and You’ll Most Likely Never See Results." No truer words were ever spoken. And yet, so many people never get this. They want to throw up a site with the keywords "Home Business" and expect to see results. They’d have a better chance of getting a date with a super model.
Brad explains how you have to really get into the basement of a niche. Well, those weren’t his words, but that’s really what he meant. Today we call them long tail keywords. These are the keywords that are down at the end of the search chain. Now, a lot of people might immediately think, "How can that do me any good? If few people search using these keywords, how do I get traffic?" Well, we’ll get to that shortly. The point is, you have absolutely no chance going against the big boys of "Home Business" or "Weight Loss" or any of the other, what I call, "main keywords." The reason is because everybody and their grandmother is optimizing on those keywords. So to have a prayer with SEO, you have to go the other route.
Now, that isn’t to say that someday you’re not going to incorporate these main keywords into your SEO. You will, but you have to get in through the back door first. Then you can start pulling in traffic from some of the major keywords.
So let’s say you’re in the niche of "weight loss", which is a very big one today. The first thing you need to do is go to a keyword suggestion tool (I use Wordtracker) and find out what some of the long tail keywords are that maybe don’t have as much competition.
Here is the URL that you need to go to in order to look these keywords up.
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
Okay, so let’s go there and look up "weight loss"
As you can see, the weight loss main keyword has over 12,000 searches a month as of this printing. That’s a lot of searches. But if you go to the Google search engine and look to see how many sites come up under the keyword "weight loss" you will find that it is over 45 million sites. Think you have a shot in Hades of putting a dent in this market?
Okay, let’s run down our keyword list to something that doesn’t quite have as much competition.
Let’s look at "weight loss spells" Hey, don’t laugh. It was searched for about 63 times last month.
If you look at the number of sites that are optimized for that keyword, it’s only about 22,ooo.
Now THAT is a much more manageable number.
See where we’re going with this?
Good. Next article we’ll pick it up from here.
Wake me when you’ve reached your 100th birthday.
Brad Cullen’s first chapter of his free giveaway book (it’s nice to be so rich that you can just give stuff away) was called "Optimize the Wrong Keywords and You’ll Most Likely Never See Results." No truer words were ever spoken. And yet, so many people never get this. They want to throw up a site with the keywords "Home Business" and expect to see results. They’d have a better chance of getting a date with a super model.
Brad explains how you have to really get into the basement of a niche. Well, those weren’t his words, but that’s really what he meant. Today we call them long tail keywords. These are the keywords that are down at the end of the search chain. Now, a lot of people might immediately think, "How can that do me any good? If few people search using these keywords, how do I get traffic?" Well, we’ll get to that shortly. The point is, you have absolutely no chance going against the big boys of "Home Business" or "Weight Loss" or any of the other, what I call, "main keywords." The reason is because everybody and their grandmother is optimizing on those keywords. So to have a prayer with SEO, you have to go the other route.
Now, that isn’t to say that someday you’re not going to incorporate these main keywords into your SEO. You will, but you have to get in through the back door first. Then you can start pulling in traffic from some of the major keywords.
So let’s say you’re in the niche of "weight loss", which is a very big one today. The first thing you need to do is go to a keyword suggestion tool (I use Wordtracker) and find out what some of the long tail keywords are that maybe don’t have as much competition.
Here is the URL that you need to go to in order to look these keywords up.
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
Okay, so let’s go there and look up "weight loss"
As you can see, the weight loss main keyword has over 12,000 searches a month as of this printing. That’s a lot of searches. But if you go to the Google search engine and look to see how many sites come up under the keyword "weight loss" you will find that it is over 45 million sites. Think you have a shot in Hades of putting a dent in this market?
Okay, let’s run down our keyword list to something that doesn’t quite have as much competition.
Let’s look at "weight loss spells" Hey, don’t laugh. It was searched for about 63 times last month.
If you look at the number of sites that are optimized for that keyword, it’s only about 22,ooo.
Now THAT is a much more manageable number.
See where we’re going with this?
Good. Next article we’ll pick it up from here.
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