We are going to target one keyword in the initial SEO stage. This will be the keyword or phrase that you have deemed to be your diamond in the rough. Remember that this is going to be a judgement call based on the competitiveness of your particular niche. If you are not sure which one to pick, I would go with one that has a low "allinanchor" number and gets a moderate number of searches per month. You also want to pick one of the top keywords in your niche and one very targeted long tail keyword that suits a product or service that you can promote. We will use these later.
You will see later that once we get your sites, (yes, I said sites, as in plural), indexed in Google, we will slowly change your targeting to more popular and competitive keywords. The main goal in the beginning is to establish a presence in the search engine indexes. The truth is that we are going to target Google and the rest will follow over time. Also, once you become familiar with the different Web 2.0 sites that we are going to use as SEO tools, it will be easier for you to rank your sites for the more competitive keyword phrases.
We are going to have several sites that we will target with several different keywords. First of all you need to decide whether you are going to promote a website or a blog (if you don't already have an existing website). I highly recommend starting with a blog. The search engines love blogs and they are very easy to set up. To narrow it down further, I suggest using a Word Press blog. You can install Word Press from your C-panel hosting account by clicking on the Fantastico button and following a couple simple directions. If you have never set up a web page or blog before and need help, then leave me a comment and I will help you. If you don't have web hosting yet, click here. This is what I use. It's a C-panel account with unlimited everything for $17.95 per month or even cheaper if you pay for longer term.
Now, for those of you who know your way around an FTP program and have put up a few websites, you may want to consider purchasing the Semiologic Pro template for Word Press. It is what I use and it has many search engine optimization features already built in to its internal structure. Word Press is very SEO friendly but all blogs are inherently page rank leaky because of their internal link structure.
OK, let's recap. You need to have your webhosting in place with your Word Press blog set up. You should have three keywords picked out. One high traffic keyword that targets your general niche. Your diamond in the rough keyword which is moderate traffic with low competition, and one highly targeted, long tail keyword that we are going to use to get your blog indexed quickly and totally dominate the top 20 results in Google.
Get all this ready because next post we are going to discuss the three pages we are going to build and how to tweak the structure of your blog to make it a little more search engine friendly. That is only if you are not using the Semiologic Pro template. If you are using Semiologic Pro, then we will talk about which features to enable.
Filed under General, Keywords, Market Research, SEO by 
Before we get into the meat of this, I just want to say a couple things. I like to use a lot of tools. You are going to quickly discover that SEO can be very time consuming. The things that I recommend are tools that I use to save time. The links that I use will more than likely be affiliate links.
I have run across people that say that you shouldn't use affiliate links when giving away free content but my question to them is why not? We are all doing this to eventually make money. That is just business. I do have a problem with people that promote products that they have never even used. I can assure you that if I recommend a product, it is because it has helped me to save time, make money, or just make life easier in general. With that said, lets talk about finding your keywords.
I use a tool called Keyword Elite. This is a very powerfull peice of software that can do much more than generate a keyword list. I am not going to spend 2 or 3 paragraphs listing all of the features here. If you want to find out more, click on the link and skim through the sales page til you get to the videos. Take the time to watch the videos and you will see why I use this tool.
But that's not all. Keyword Elite can get you results from ask.com, google suggestion tool, yahoo, free keywords WT, keyword discovery, and word tracker. The last two require that you are a paid member of keyword discovery and word tracker. You enter your user name and passwords and the program automatically logs in when you do a search. I personally use the paid version of Word Tracker with Keyword Elite.
If you don't want to make the investment into your business right now don't worry. There are a couple of decent free tools that you can use. The best of these is Word Tracker. The reason I think this is one of the best is because the results you get are the exact phrases that were searched for. Some programs will re-arrange the wording of the phrase. My second pick is a program called Good Keywords. If you use both of these together you should be able to generate a decent keyword list.
I highly recommend that when you can afford to, you upgrade your account at Word Tracker which is about $300 a year (you can pay by the month also but it is more expensive) and then buy Keyword Elite which is around $175 and use the two in conjunction like I do. The videos will show you what Keyword Elite can do and you can try a free trial of Word Tracker here.
What ever tool you are going to use, enter your main keyword relevant to your topic and generate your list. We are going to try and target keywords that don't have a lot of competition but still get a decent amount of searches per month. I would make a list of the top 20 to 30 keywords in your list. Now you need to use your judgement here. If your niche is something uber popular like "weight loss", you might want to go ahead and eliminate some of the most searched for phrases because there will be a huge amount of competition. On the other hand, you might find one of those hidden gems that the majority is not targeting. It's a matter of how much time do you want to spend. That is why I buy the tools.
If you are using the paid version of Word Tracker or KE, the program will tell you how much competition each keyword in your list has. If you are using free programs, here is how I determine how competitive a keyword is.
I make a spread sheet in excel with the following columns, Keyword, All In Anchor, "results", and searches. Then add your keywords to the keyword column and how many times it has been searched in the searches column. Sort by number of searches. Now open up google. Type in allinanchor:"your keyword" and record the number of results in the All In Anchor column. This will tell you how many websites are actually targeting that keyword phrase with anchor text links on the site. These are your competition.
Now type in "your keyword" and record the number of results in the "results" column. This will tell you how many websites contain your exact keyword phrase within their website. Do this for your top 20 to 30 keywords and then compare. Look at your All In Anchor column. Do you have any keywords with less than 1000? If so, you can easily dominate the search results in Google for those keywords. You want to look for the ones that fit this criteria and still get a lot of searches. Those are the diamonds in the rough that we are looking for.
This is going to take some time so I am going to stop for now. The next post we will continue with the keywords and talk about some strategy. Have your spread sheet or something similar ready.
Filed under Market Research by
Keywords are the building blocks of a successful SEO strategy. The best way to get quick results using Web 2.0 strategies is to target long tail keywords with moderate to little competition. If you want to go after a highly competetive search term, know that you will need thousands of backlinks and months of time and effort to even make a dent in the search engine results. You can still target the more competetive keywords. Most of your long tail keyword phrases will include one or more of the more competetive words. This places your keyword phrase in a broad search. Overtime, once you have dominated the listings for your longtail keyword phrase, you can refine your optimization to target the more competetive terms. In the meantime, you will be receiveing organic traffic from the keywords that you originally targeted.
I am going to show you how to take a long tail keyword targeted to your product and get listings with links to your website or blog in the first page of Google rankings within a weeks time. I have been able to do this in as little as 3 days time. If you want to see an example of my results, go to Google and search for Peel Away Ads. I just did this and my Squidoo lens is ranked number 2. Keep in mind that the first 3 results are paid advertising. I have been on the first page of results ever since the first week that the "peel away ads" product was launched.
Ok, enough bragging. Actually, I just want you to see what kind of results are possible. I was in the Google results in only 3 days after building my Squidoo lens. For those of you who don't know, it can take months just to get indexed by Google, if you go through the regular channels. With that said, never submit your website or blog to Google. The methods that I am going to show you will allow your website to be picked up by the Google spiders in a natural way that is much faster than going through their submission process.
Lets get to the point of this post…keywords. The first thing you want to do is to develope a good list of keywords and you especially want to find 2 or 3 low competition long tail keywords. I think there is a lot of confusion about what a "long tail" keyword is. The graph below is the result of some keyword research that I did on the keyword phrase "website traffic". I took the first 100 results and made a graphic representation in Excel. The vertical axis is the number of searches per month. The horizontal axis is the actual keywords and key word phrases.
You will see that there are only a hand full of keywords that get searched thousands of times per month. The majority of the keywords don't get searched for nearly as often. When you look at the graph, you will see that the results form a kind of a tail off to the right. This is where the term "long tail keyword" comes from. They are the keywords that are not as popular and are usually keyword phrases consisting of 3 or more words. This does not mean that just because a keyword phrase uses 3 or 4 words that it is a long tail keyword.
If you want to see fast results, then you need to target these long tail keywords. You can usually find a few that still get a good number of searches per month. Make a list of 10 or so that you think are most relevant to the product or service you are promoting. Then you want to see which ones out of those ten have the least amount of competition. The one with the least amount of competition is the keyword that we will target and optimize for on your website, blog, Squidoo lens, Hub page, and the articles and press releases we are going to create. I know it sounds like a lot of work and it is, but you will be amazed at the results you get.
That's enough for today. If you already know how to find and research your long tail keywords than go ahead and get yours ready. If you don't have a clue or just aren't sure, then come back and read my next post. I am going to go over some methods that I use and talk about some tools that are available to help you uncover those hidden gems (keywords) that are still out there.
Filed under Market Research by
