Keyword Optimization

Optimize The Wrong Keywords And You'll Likely Never See Results ..."

If you are anything like I was, you probably created a new website, submitted it to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling.

After a couple of weeks only a few stray people show up at your website, so you try and "optimize" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in 1 of the millions of search engines. A couple more weeks go by and still no results.

At this point you probably gave up and decide to either build another website around a different target market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you've probably figured out by now, this is not the way to go about doing things.

Let's create a sports related website. Our website will primarily sell collectibles. Before we start creating and collecting content for the website we need to do a little keyword research. This is VERY important and should not be skipped. To do our keyword research we need to visit a few websites.

The first of which should be http://www.goodkeywords.com

They have a very good keyword tool and best of all, it's free! Once we've downloaded this software, we can enter the most generic keyword for our website into the software. In our example, our main keyword phrase would be "sports cards".  Good Keywords will return a list of related terms. The "count" column will then show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for the previous month within the Yahoo.com search engine.

Generally, you can take that number times 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.

If a keyword is searched that many times in Yahoo, then 100 times out of 100, the competition you will have to outrank will be extremely fierce. This is not something you should try to take on right away.

Let's check Google to see exactly how many websites are competing for this keyword. Go to Google and enter "sports cards", you'll see there are almost 79 million websites competing for this keyword phrase!

Eventually, you will be able to target HUGE keywords such as "sports cards", but it's always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and THEN you can focus on the larger keywords.

If we scroll down, we can find some more specific keyword phrases like "sports card pricing", "sports card shop", and "sports trading card".

These are possible keyword phrases we should target. Once we have our list of 3 to 4 keyword phrases, we need to go to Google and check out the competition to see exactly how hard it will be to optimize for the specified keywords.

We'll begin with the phrase "sports card shop" because people looking for a sports card shop are more than likely trying to find out where to buy sports cards online or in a store.

Notice the 3rd site is a sub page. This is good news because, typically, if a website's subpage is ranking well in Google, we have an immediate advantage if we choose to target the same keyword with our homepage (i.e. www.domain.com). We will go into more detail as to why it's easier to rank well for your homepage than any other webpage on your website.

Note: Here is the short definition of Google Page Rank. Page Rank is Google's way of giving a specific value to how popular a website is. It is based on the number of "votes" other websites cast for your website. A "vote" is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to your website. Generally, the more "votes" or links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be. Page Rank is 1 of the many factors that Google takes into account when ranking websites. In order to see your own Google Page Rank, as well as others, you must have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer. You can get that for free here: http://toolbar.google.com

Seeing that the #1 ranked website for this keyword only has a Page Rank of 4 is also good news for us, because a Page Rank of 4 should be easy to obtain. Remember, the ONLY way to increase our website's Page Rank is by getting other websites to link to us.

Later, I'll show you the right way to get thousands of links pointing to your website in a matter of a few days.

Next we need to view the source code of this website by clicking "view", then "source" within our web browser as shown below:

This will open up a text file for us to have a look at and see if this website is actually optimizing their "On-page Optimization factors".

* Side Note: There are 2 types of optimization, on-page and off-page optimization.

As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things. Whether or not they are using <h1> header tags and are placing the keyword "sports card shop" within those tags. In this case, they are not... AND they aren't even using <h1> header tags at all! Another great thing for us!

Whether or not they are using their main keyword in the <title> tags of the website. In this case, they are, which is one of the main reasons they're currently ranked highly for "sports card shop".

Whether or not they've bolded, underlined, or italicized the words "sports card shop" anywhere in the body of the webpage. In this case, yes... they have.

They've actually bolded the keyword "sports card shop" 4 different times throughout the webpage. At first glance, it looks as though this is another one of the major reasons they've managed to grab the top spot for this keyword. Bolding is something we can do right away, so now we know that we should also bold some of the keywords throughout our copy.

Whether or not they are using <alt> image tags and placing the keyword "sports card shop" within that tag. In this case, that answer is easy because they're not even using any images at all! This is definitely something we can do when optimizing our website. And another thing we can do to "one-up" this #1 ranked website. It is best to add images that are actually named after our main keyword. For example, we could insert an image and call it sports-card-shop-logo.jpg and so on.

The final thing we want to note is whether or not they've placed the keyword once at the very beginning of the copy, and once at the very end of the copy. In this case they have placed it near the beginning BUT have not placed it at the end. This is another thing we can do to better optimize our webpage.

We now know we can easily out optimize this #1 ranked website!

At least for all the on-page optimization factors that Google deems as important. The reason we know we can out optimize them is because of the following things we've found out by analyzing their website:

The website is not using the keyword "sports card shop" in an <h1> header tag. The website did not use <alt> image tags containing the keyword "sports card shop".

The website didn't place the keyword "sports card shop" at the very end of the page.

l The website has a low Page Rank of 4, which can be beaten. We can easily achieve a Page Rank of 5. I'll show you the exact steps for this in the coming lessons.

The 3rd website is ranked with their subpage (sportscardfun.com/sports_card_shops.asp). By optimizing our index page for this keyword, we can one up them.

* Remember, the main idea behind ranking well on Google is to analyze the top ranked websites and then doing those things that they're doing, BUT just a little more to on up them and obtain a better ranking.

We'll continue to go through the same process for the other 2 keywords we've found. It is best to analyze the top 5 ranking websites for each keyword. If the top 5 websites for a specific keyword have a Google Page Rank of 6 or higher, it's probably not best to shoot for that keyword until we build some momentum and get some initial traffic from the easier ranking keywords with less competition.

Earlier I mentioned that keyword research was very important in building traffic. Some other very good resources for building keywords and finding niche phrases include the following:

http://www.wordtracker.com

http://inventory.overture.com 

http://www.keywordlocator.com