Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Optimize The Wrong Keywords And You'll Likely Never See Results ...
Let me give you a specific example of what your very first steps MUST be when creating any website. In our example, let's create a weight loss related website. Our weight loss related website will primarily sell a weight loss eBook. 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 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 keyword would be "weight loss".
http://www.goodkeywords.com.
“Optimize The Wrong Keywords And You'll Likely Never See Results ...”
Good Keywords will return a list of related terms. SINo. is a next numbering system and just shows shows you the rank of which keyword was searched the most times last month. The SINo. 1 is "weight loss" and was searched 1,413,194 times in the Overture search engine last month. The Words column shows the specific keyword that was searched. If you enter "weight loss", the Good Keywords tool will bring back the 100 keywords containing the word "weight loss" that were searched for last month.
The "count" column will then show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for the previous month within the Overture.com search engine. Generally, you can take that number times 3, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.
Already, I will see many people making a BIG mistake, and I'll admit, I was one of these people when I first begin my online endevours. Do NOT start off by optimizing for the keyword "weight loss" Why? you ask... If a keyword is searched that many times in Overture, 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. For now, just take my word for it. I'll be teaching you later why starting with these highly competitive phrases is not smart.
Let's take a quick peek at Google so I can show you exactly how many websites are competing for this keyword. If we go to Google and enter "weight loss", you'll see there are almost 20 million websites competing for this keyword phrase! I don't know about you, but that's an awful lot of websites to be competing against, especially if you're just starting. By the end of this course, you will be able to eventually target HUGE keywords such as "weight loss", 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. Ok, so back to finding which keywords we want to target. If we scroll down, we can find some more specific keyword phrases like "weight loss story", "weight loss picture", and "safe weight loss". These could be possible keywords we should target to begin with. Once we have our list of 3
to 4 keywords, we need to go to Google and check out the competition to see exactly how hard it will be to optimize for the specified keyword.
We'll begin with the keyword "weight loss story" because people looking for weight loss stories are more than likely trying to find out how to lose weight and may buy your weight loss eBook. You'll notice that the #1 ranked website for "weight loss story" at the time of writing this e-Book is:
which is not a top level webpage, meaning it's not simply
http://www.runwalkjog.com/weight_loss_success_story.htm
http://www.runwalkjog.com
This is good news for us 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). For now, just take my word on this, as I will go into more detail why it's usually easier to rank well for your homepage than any other webpage on your website. You'll also notice that the website has a Google Page Rank of 4.
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 (getting other websites to "cast votes" for us). Later, I'll teach you the right way to get thousands of links pointing to your website in a matter of a few days.
View The Source Code Every website on the internet is created using a programming language called "html". In order to see the "html code" that is used to create a webpage, we must click "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 "Onpage Optimization factors".
Whether or not they are using h1 header tags and are placing the keyword "weight loss story" 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 "weight
loss stories". * Side Note: There are 2 types of search engine optimization methods, onpage and offpage optimization. We'll cover offpage optimization in later chapters, but for now we're going to have a look at "Onpage Optimization". As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things.
The website is not using the keyword "weight loss stories" in an h1 header tag.
The website did not use alt image tags containing the keyword "weight loss stories". The website did not place the keyword "weight loss stories" at the very end of the page. 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 chapters. The website is ranked with their subpage . By optimizing
our index page for this keyword, we can one up them. (Weight_loss_success_story.htm)
Remember, the main idea behind ranking well on Google is to analyze the top ranked
websites to find out exactly what they're doing and then do those things, BUT just a little better to one 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. Note: 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, like I mentioned earlier. Above 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:
Whether or not they've bolded, underlined, or italicized the words "weight loss story" anywhere in the body of the webpage. In this case, yes... they have. They've actually bolded the keyword "weight loss stories" 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 "weight loss stories" 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 weight-loss-stories-graphic1.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.
Ok, so now we've selected our main 3 keywords:
weight loss story
weight loss picture
safe weight loss
Notice that all of the keywords contain the word "weight loss". This will make things easier for us when we begin to optimize our offpage ranking factors which you'll learn about later.
Let's Optimize Our Webpage ...
Step 1: The first thing we need to do is select a page Title for our website.
The page title should: Include ONLY our main keywords. The least amount of words you can place in the title, the more weight Google will give to each of the keywords and the higher you will rank. When creating your page title, it should not look like this: Welcome to our website!
It should not even look like this, which does contain our main keywords, but contains an unnecessary number of words:
weight loss story and weight loss picture and safe weight loss
Although that title isn't horrible and does contain all of your main keywords, you should do a couple of things to cut down on words used. This would be a perfect title for your webpage: Weight Loss Story | Safe Weight Loss Picture
Notice that I've: Taken out all of the "ands" Replaced one of the "ands" with a "|" character
Note: This character is located on the keyboard directly above the "enter key".
Combined the keywords "Safe Weight Loss" with "Weight Loss Picture” Always Combine Your Keyword When Possible to cut down on the total number of words that
are in your title!
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Website optimization - Learn How To Optimize Your Website
Do you think optimizing your website is a big task as learning rocket science..? My view is no its not a big task to optimize your website in search engines if we do it in a systematic manner.
Here are the few tips how you need to optimize your website in a systematic manner. Basically search engine optimization depends 2 factors which are as follows :
1. On Page optimization : On Page optimization plays a vital role in any search engine optimization campaign. If on page optimization of a website is done carefully keeping in mind some of the important factors then there is maximum chance of getting a high search engine ranking.
Things to do in On Page Optimization:
Title: Since all the sites are known to search engines by its title first, so an attractive and keyword rich title should be used to represent the website.
Head: This part of web page contains two important thing for SEO point of view. These are:
Description Meta Tag: An effective description should include all the important Products/Services in the form of nicely written keywords format present on that particular page.
Keywords Meta Tag: Use all the important keywords in this meta tag.
Body: Body of a website requires more concentration while optimizing it. The entire body part should check for errors. There are a number of sites available on web that can do this for you free. There are a number of automatic web page compilation programs which can give you the output of html error check within some seconds. Some more things that you can do in body part are:
Alt Tag: According W3 guidelines all images on a web page must contain the Alt tag. It is beneficial in cases when the images are not displayed due to some problem, then the alternative text contained in the images are displayed to the users to understand what was there at the place of images.
Anchor Text: Hyper-linking some important words or a group of words to direct users to some other destination is very good in regards of SEO. The words contained in that hyper-links are called Anchor Text. Since these words represent some other document by being linked so the Anchor text gets more value as compared to other simple texts present on a web page.
Title in href: you should use title tag to briefly describe a link to some other page.
Content: You should optimize the content of a web page keeping in mind the keywords you are using for that particular page. The content should look natural and informative so that a user wish to come again to your website. Using too many keywords in content is not considered a good SEO practice but a well written, quality and unique content is always favorable for getting a high ranking in SERPs. The content should be for visitors and not for search engines. If the content is unique, original and of some use then the Search engines will find them by themselves.