Secrets of SEO Marketing:
Strategies on How I learned to Get to the Top of Search Engines and How You Can Too
By Jimena Cortes
Copyright 2011 by Jimena Cortes
All Rights Reserved.
Reproduction or translation of any part of this book beyond that permitted by Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 Copyright Act without permission of the copyright owner is unlawful. Requests for Permission or further information should be addressed to info@wizardmedia.net.
Smashwords Edition
Table of Contents
Preface…..………………………………….………3
Chapter 1: How I Learned SEO …….……..….…8
Chapter
2:Understanding the Search Engines and Searcher
Behavior…….……….…………..….……13
Chapter 3- Keyword Research.. ……………..……20
Chapter 4: Defining Your Goals………….....….…30
Chapter 5: On Page SEO……………………….…..34
Chapter 6: Your Blog and/or Forum………..….….41
Section 2: Link Building…………………………….46
Chapter 7: Creating and Distributing Articles…….49
Chapter 8- Videos and Podcasts……………….……58
Chapter 9: Press Releases…………………….……..64
Chapter 10- Blog Commenting and Links……....…67
Chapter 11: Directories…………………….…..……72
Chapter 12: Forum Posting…………………..…..…80
Chapter 13: Social Bookmarking…………………..83
Chapter 14: Social Media……………….……..…....85
Chapter 15: Tying it all together………………..….87
Chapter 16- SEO Q&A…………………….....….…98
Chapter 17- SEO Tools………………………….…102
Chapter 18- Tips and Tricks for Your Website…..104
Preface
I wrote this book for those who know nothing about SEO and want to learn true and proven strategies to get their websites to the top of the search engines. This is not an advanced book on SEO, but rather more of a beginners guide to understanding how it works. Can you put the strategies in this book to use and see great results? You bet, but SEO is a process in which you need to be consistent and patient. Over the next few chapters I will share with you the secrets of SEO that I have learned to rank any website I want in today’s biggest search engines like Google.
Over the past decade, the World Wide Web has integrated itself as a large part of our societies and everyday life. It has created Billionaires out of some, multi-millionaires out of others, and countless jobs. It has also created new industries and most importantly new ways to connect with prospects even for offline businesses.
However, many businesses have been rather slow to react to these changing times. If you have already created a website and put your company online, congratulations! If you have yet to make that leap, do not worry, armed with this book you will learn what you need to know about attracting qualified customers to your site. Actually, it may even be to your benefit if you have not created an online presence yet.
The reason being that this way you learn what you need to do first, so you can complete this task with a clearer plan of action that will save you many mistakes that I had to learn by costly trial and error.
My reason for creating this book is to help business owners recognize the huge opportunity they have to attract customers when they leverage the power of the search engines. Now there are two ways to get traffic from search engines. One is through pay per click, such as Google Adwords. The other, is by being listed organically in their search results.
The problem with paid listings is that in many markets you can be paying anywhere from $1-$5-$25 or more per click! And when your budget runs out, so does your ad. Another draw-back is that people know those listings are paid, so they tend to click on them less than the organic results, which they deem to have more authority since the search engine ranked them.
PPC is a great strategy to attract customers, however you must look at it as more of a short term marketing strategy and SEO as a long term marketing strategy. The reason being is that you can put up an ad today and you can start getting clicks and calls tomorrow. And that’s great about it. However, as time goes on and more advertisers with larger budgets start coming in, your cost per click is going to continue to rise, making it more difficult and expensive to compete for the same terms.
With organic listings your site always comes up when the keywords you rank for are typed and you pay nothing per click.
However, just because you don’t pay per click with organic traffic, it doesn’t mean it’s “free”. It takes a lot of time and effort to get your site to the top and time is money.
However, the benefits of SEO are much greater since it gives your site a reputation as a credible source, because search engines like Google are highly trusted. If you’re number 1 for a term, then people tend to assume you must be the top company/expert in that field.
With a good SEO strategy you can bring a high amount of targeted visitors to your site who see you as an authority just because a search engine listed you on their first page of results. This is why this book is dedicated to helping you do just that.
What I see when I talk to business owners is confusion as to where to put their marketing dollars so that they actually get a positive return. There’s a lot of options out there of where to advertise, and many slick sales people will show up at your door selling you ways to advertise, whether it be a directory, a magazine, newspaper, TV, etc but can they guarantee that people who need or want what you have to sell will see the ad? Chances are the answer is no. This is why search engine optimization is such a powerful and effective way to advertise your business. The only people who find your site will be those who are looking for the products and services you sell. Once you have attracted these qualified customers it is up to you to make sure that your website sells your stuff better than the competition. If you do SEO properly and you have a website that converts well, you will be on your way to creating a profitable business, one where do you don’t have to wonder where the next client or sale is coming from because you get them daily from these efforts.
That is the power of SEO, which is why I have devoted my career to not only mastering this valuable skill, but also helping others grow their business with it. I can’t think of a more rewarding feeling than knowing that I can literally turn around someone’s business for the better by applying these skills properly. These skills have taken me years and a lot of money to learn and I will be covering my SEO secrets in the following pages.
It is by no means a mistake that you found this book. This book is going to help you grow your business and understand and master an otherwise mysterious and confusing skill: SEO
Even if you don’t do your own SEO after you have read this book, you will understand how it works, so that if you decide to hire someone to do this for you, this book will give you the ability to ask the right questions, and know what the person you hire should and shouldn’t do. Unfortunately there are a lot of bad SEOs out there that give this industry a bad name, and it’s a shame. However, when you know this stuff yourself, it will be much more difficult to take advantage of you.
That’s actually how I learned SEO, but I will be covering this information in the following chapter more in depth.
Now back to marketing online. I am amazed at how many entrepreneurs I talk to who don’t even know what kind of return on investment they are getting from the little bit of marketing they are doing. Others when they start to track, often times will see that the money they are spending does not pull its weight. The days of putting an ad in the Yellow Pages and waiting for the phone to ring are long gone.
Other forms of advertising are on their last legs and losing their effectiveness. For example, newspapers are declining rapidly in readership, with TiVo consumers can now fast forward through your commercial, the do not call list stopped many telemarketing campaigns (and if you ask me telemarketing is interruptive, a primitive form of marketing, and not a good experience for the sales person or the prospect), Direct mail can work, but often times you will get a 1-2% return and the cost of postage continues to increase, print ads also have rising costs, and emails most of the time either get blocked or don’t get read, since people are now bombarded by emails.
With all these obstacles, can you think of a more powerful marketing strategy than being found on the number one position on Google, Yahoo or Bing when your prospect is searching for a solution to their problem and your product or service is the one they need to solve it?
I don’t think so. The power of having a proper SEO campaign is the equivalent of having a Billboard on Times Square and everyone who looks at it are people who were looking for what you have to offer at that exact moment. This book is designed to help you understand how to implement a proper SEO campaign and understand how the search engines work. After reading this book you will be prepared to take on the search engine giants.
One thing to note however, search engines like Google are constantly changing their algorithms so what works in SEO today, at the time this book is being written may not work as soon as 1 year from now. To stay abreast all of the constant changes in search engine marketing, you can visit my website at www.wizardmedia.net and read my blog or look for an updated copy of this book on the site. Also, it is a good idea to sign up for my monthly newsletter where I discuss the latest in SEO and marketing related information.
Chapter 1
How I learned SEO
This will be a rather short chapter, but an important one nonetheless. I want to share with you my journey and how I decided to learn this skill. Everyone’s way and reasons for learning are different; mine came disguised as a misfortune.
In mid 2009 I decided to launch a self defense products website. Since my background was in marketing and I knew how much advertising costs via direct mail, magazines, TV and PPC, I knew there was no way I could be effective in these media with the limited budget I had. I knew in my heart that being able to rank at the top of Google for terms related to the products being sold in the store would be my ticket to making this business successful on a shoe-string budget.
At first, I tried to learn SEO myself by visiting marketing forums online and reading blog posts. I thought because I came from a marketing background and had experience with online marketing that this would be easy. That could not be further from the truth. I spent countless hours trying to figure out the SEO giant.
There seemed to be so many conflicting opinions online about all aspects of search engine optimization. The more I “learned” the more confused I grew.
People were suggesting all kinds of ways to rank your site and trying to sell you their product to get you to the top. With so many options and conflicting information I just had no clue what to spend my time doing for best results, how to do it properly, how to track it or where to put my money.
After 6 months of trying to optimize my site on my own and getting nowhere, I decided that I would hire a company to do it for me.
An Indian firm named Auroin called me up, and ran reports on my website that looked very professional.
Because of the professionalism they showed me, the low enticing pricing they gave me and the big promises they made, I decided to hire them for a 3 month campaign. We agreed on 10 keywords that I really wanted to rank for at the time and paid my fee of $400 per month. They even offered me a special promotion of 10 additional man hours per month if I signed up by a certain date. I took their offer.
After the 3 months, they told me if I was not ranked for the keywords we agreed upon, they would continue to work free of charge until I was on page 1 for my chosen terms. I thought this was a win-win situation, so what could possibly go wrong?
They sent me monthly reports on the progress of the campaign, showing me all the book marks and links they got for me. They helped with some of my on-page SEO, although looking back now at what they did and what I know, it wasn’t the best. They did article marketing the first month, which I knew should be a part of the SEO campaign because it is to this day very powerful.
They then told me to continue the article marketing for the second month there would be an additional fee. Oh oh, looks like red flags are starting to show up, besides the fact that they are in India…
So three months came and went, and I was still nowhere near page 1 for any of the terms we chose. On 1 term, I was on page 7 and that is the closest I got. All others I was not even in the top 100 results. The most that this company did for me was taking my page rank from 1 to 2. If you don’t know what page rank is, don’t worry, I will be covering that in later chapters.
So naturally, I thought ok whatever, this will take longer than I or they originally thought. Just as a precaution I canceled the card they had on auto bill so no funny stuff happened in month 4.
As you can probably imagine, they were not willing to stand by what they promised, and came after payment for month 4 if I wanted to continue the campaign, so obviously I did not. I realized I had just lost $1200 and all I got from it was a page rank that was a little better and on page 7 for 1 term.
No increase traffic whatsoever which is what I was going after. So it was back to square one. Now I was forced to learn SEO. I wrote down all the tactics I had read about online. I tried out several techniques and tested how effective each was. I finally started to see a significant boost in my rankings and in my traffic. Soon I started to get sales.
I had cracked the code. I read blogs, books, bought digital courses and frequented marketing forums tirelessly; I took the things that confused me or stuff I had found conflicting opinions on and just tested it. I saw results. I was so happy that now my website was making money and I had learned a priceless skill. I now had the power to rank websites at the top of search engines and get floods of free targeted traffic to any site I wanted to. I felt on top of the world and I was.
If this company had never stiffed me, I would have never learned this skill. I would have never found my calling. After I learned SEO, it was great that I had a successful site, but I realized that I really enjoyed doing this work more, but most importantly I enjoyed the results it gave the people I was doing it for.
A proper SEO campaign can take a business on the edge of bankruptcy, back to success. Your customers, no matter what business you are in, are searching for you online, and online reviews are the new word of mouth.
If you don’t believe me take a look at what you do. When you are looking for a product or service, do you use the internet to find what you need? Do you find several resources for that product or service and then based on many different factors like website professionalism, price, credibility etc, make a decision on who to buy from? Do you ever research a company before doing business with them and if you see bad reviews think twice before handing them your money or walking into their location?
I bet you do, and guess what, your customers do too. So if you ignore having an online presence, you are ignoring the media by which customers find you. In the following chapters I am going to teach you everything I do to get my own websites and my client’s websites to the top of the search engines. What you are about to learn took me countless hours of frustration and loss of money to figure out. I hope you enjoy this book and I hope you are able to increase your bottom line from what I am about to reveal to you
Chapter 2
Understanding the Search Engines and
Searcher Behavior
As of January of 2009 according to Comscore more than 12 billion searches were being done every month online which is nearly 400 million every day, meaning that is about 4500 searches happening every single second! Before the internet people used to have to down to the library and search through countless volumes to get an answer to their questions, which now they can do in mere seconds with the power of the internet and the organization of the search engines.
When a person does a search online, they are looking for an answer, a solution or piece of information. They may be looking for a specific website (navigational query) to buy something (transactional query) or simply to learn something (informational query).
We will cover these more in depth in the following pages. People typically search for phrases involving 2-3 words. If they don’t find what they are looking for within the first or second page, they typically change the search query.
So you can get an idea of the market share each search engine has, take a look at this graph:
Search is so big it is one of the top online activities people do, even bigger than social networking believe it or not. Check out the chart on the next page:
There is no question that one of the best and most important ways to reach consumers and build your business is through search marketing, no matter how big or small your company is or what target market it focuses on.
Now let’s look at the opportunities we have to capitalize on the three different types of online searches.
Navigational Queries: (trying to find a pre-determined site)
Opportunity- pulls the searcher away from the site they are trying to find and get traffic destined for a competitor.
Value- low, with the exception of navigational searches for the brand the searcher was looking for, as these will have a high conversion rate.
Informational Queries: (Looking for particular information) these types of queries are usually not transaction oriented and people may be looking for all kinds of things like the weather, directions to a friend’s house, Hollywood gossip and so on.
Opportunities- if you have good information you could attract a large following or inbound links from others linking to your site.
Value- low, unless the information being searched is information on a product, service or company, then these can have high value.
Transactional Queries:
Opportunities- Achieve a transaction, whether it is a free trial, email address or actual purchase.
Value- Very high. These are the best types of phrases to go after in an SEO campaign since you will gain leads or sales from the traffic you attract.
One thing I’d like to point out, just because transactional queries have the highest value it does not mean you should rule out ranking for information queries. If your site has good information, this can be a great way to start a relationship with users who find your information useful and come back to buy from you at a later date.
Eye Tracking: How People View Search Results
Back in 2007, on SearchEngineLand’s blog (http://searchengineland.com/eye-tracking-on-universal-and-personalized-search-12233)
I saw a study that caught my eye. When searching online, users spent the most amount of time looking at the top left hand corner of the search results (indicated by A). They then scan vertically from there to the titles that catch their attention the most.
This is a great reminder of how important it is for a business to not just be found on page 1 of the search results, but be in the top 3 spots on the page to get the most traffic.
What Search Engines Look For
Search engines use hundreds of different factors when determining where to place each site on their search results. We will cover a few of the most important ones in the following paragraphs in no particular order.
Website loading speed. Google in particular takes into account how fast your website loads. They are obsessed with speed and want to provide their users with search results ultra fast. If you haven’t noticed, often times when you search for something on Google it starts pulling up results as you are typing, as well as giving you suggestions for what key phrase to type. Therefore, if your website is slow to load this can actually affect your rankings in a negative way.
Page structure. We will cover this in more detail in the following chapters but it is a very important ranking factor.
Fresh content. Google does not like static sites that never change. If you put up a website and then never update it, to the search engines the site is static and can have negative effects on your rank. This is why it is a good idea to create a blog on your site and update it at least once a month, so that you always have fresh content. The more often you have new content, the more often the search engine spiders will visit your site. This is a good thing, so make sure to do this.
Age of domain. The older your website is the better. Often times it is difficult to get a new website to high rankings because it lacks domain age. The best thing to do in this scenario is purchase your domain for several years, so the search engines can see that you are not a fly-by night spam site and you plan to stick around. Then be patient, as your road to high rankings will be longer than a website with at least 1 or 2 years of being around.
Social Media. As of 2009, search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing started tracking social media interactions into their algorithms. This means that now your social media status can affect your search engine rank. The more followers, friends, re-tweets, fans and interactions you have in your social media accounts, the more that is going to help you in ranking for your keywords. Be sure to be active in social media and link your accounts to your website.
Text on page. This should be an obvious one, but it is amazing to me how many people don’t write the page text on their websites without their keyword phrases in mind. How are you going to rank for “SEO company” if that phrase is nowhere on your page? Make sure not to keyword stuff that phrase either. Just put the keyword phrases your want to rank for naturally on your page. Keyword density should be around no more than 2%.
Title tags, Meta tags, description tags and alt tags. These in a sense go along with the text on page description I mentioned above. You want to put your keywords in the title of the page, not the name of your website as I see many people doing. The same goes for the other tags, but we will cover this with more detail in the chapter titled “On-page SEO”.
Bounce rate. The bounce rate refers to how long someone stays on your site before they “bounce”. If your site visitors land on your page and then stay on for a few seconds before they leave, chances are you will have a high bounce rate and this will have negative effects on your SEO campaign. Google wants to deliver great results to its users, so if your website has a low conversion rate and high bounce rate, your site must not be very engaging, and thus you will be listed lower in the search results.
Back links. This is one of the most important ranking factors to this day, and the bulk of any SEO campaign. Getting other websites to link back to yours is like getting a vote for your site. The more people who “vote” for you, the more popular the search engines think you are the higher they will list you on their results. Not all back links are created equal. Some carry more weight than others. For example, if a high authority site like CNN.com links to you, their link can count for as many as 1000 links from lower quality sites. We will cover this topic in more detail as well in the following chapters.
Chapter 3
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the most important part of any SEO campaign. If you choose the wrong keywords to target, all the on-page SEO and link building in the world is not going to make you any money. Remember, the whole reason you are doing any of this is because you want to make money.
So if you choose keywords that are not profitable for your business, which only bring traffic that is not targeted, then everything else will be a waste of time.
If there is any chapter in this book, you really need to master, it would be this one.
There are many tools you can use for keyword research. To keep things cost effective for you, I will focus on free tools.
When you first begin this step, think about who your ideal customer is. Think about the most profitable products and services you offer. The ones you want to sell the most of. Then, think of the possible keyword phrases customers would type to find those products and services or your kind of business.
Create a list of these types of phrases. If you sell several products or have several services, create several search phrases for each you think people might type to find this.
For example, if you are a contractor, someone may type contractor, roofing contractor, plumbing contractor, etc.
Then take into account geography. Are you a national business that sells products locally, nationally or internationally? If so, you probably only need to rank for the products and services you sell like “diamond rings” for example. But if you are a local business, then you want to rank for what you offer within the city which you service.
Going back to the contractor example, you may want the keyword “contractors in Las Vegas” or “general contractors Las Vegas” if that is where you do business.
Also take into account motivation levels and desires. Someone may want to find the best in the business so they may type “best contractor in Las Vegas” or “top personal coach”. You need to consider all of these possibilities when creating your keyword list. To keep track of the terms you want I would suggest creating your list in Microsoft Excel.
Now that you have your keyword list ready, put some of the keywords into the Google insights for search tool found here:
google.com/insights/search
When you put your keyword terms for a particular product or service here, you will see the search trends over time of those phrases. Why is this important? Because we do not want to focus our SEO campaign on terms whose search volume is decreasing. This free tool will also show you the top searches related to what you put in and rising or “breakout” searches. Pay attention to the rising searches listed and the top keywords listed as well. This is a great tool to get ideas on additional keywords to research, since it is giving you the top terms and those that are rising in search volume. Add the keywords from this list to your excel sheet if you find some that you’d like to possibly target.
Repeat this step for all the products and services you have. Make sure you add the recommended terms you want from here into your saved keyword list. We then want to check how much traffic they have.
We can do this by using Google’s keyword tool. To find it, just type Google keyword tool into Google and it should be the first result. Put all the terms you want to check in here. You can only put up to 100 phrases at one time to check.
Once you do that, Google will show you how many monthly searches each phrase has. They will also suggest additional keywords based on what you put in.
On the left hand side of the page, you will see something that says “match types” and it will say “Broad”, “Exact”, and “Phrase”. I typically choose exact, which I means I want to see the exact amount of searches for each phrase as it appears exactly. If you choose to view the broad traffic for example, it will show you the amount of searches made with any of the keywords in the phrase in any order.
I don’t like to look at broad traffic personally, because some people type things like “free” or “cheap” with the search term I want, and that’s not the traffic I want to include in my search numbers. The reason being because I will not be targeting that kind of traffic since they are not looking to buy. Broad match is too broad and I want to see the traffic for that particular search phrase, not for all possibilities with those words in it.
Phrase match means you are viewing all the searches with that particular phrase in it, but will include searches with additional keywords.
When you see the search traffic with the exact match, now you can see which phrases or keywords are the ones with the most traffic. Remember, these search numbers are only for Google, which means for each term there actually are additional searches being done in either Yahoo or Bing. However, since Google has the majority of the market share, that additional traffic is rather small.
You can click on the keywords that most interest you from this list and download it onto your computer. What I like to do at this point is check the amount advertisers are paying on Adwords for the terms I am interested in. You can do this by switching to the “Traffic Estimator” tab on the left hand side of the page. Also, you can sign into Adwords with your Google account and it will show the cost per click in the initial search without having to switch to the traffic estimator.
I do this because if someone is willing to pay more for a particular term than another, that means that term is probably converting better for them.
Once you hone in on the key phrases with the rising or top searches, a good amount of traffic and a high CPC (Cost per Click), you have a list of potential great profitable keywords to target.
Now you have to determine how difficult or how competitive the websites are in the top positions on Google for this term. This is competition research and will be covered more in depth in the following section.
Competition Research
Type the keywords you are researching into Google one by one. Look at what websites come up first. Take the URLS of the top 3 sites and put them into www.woorank.com
This website will help you analyze the top sites for the term/terms you want and let you see several important key factors to show you why they are the top site for that keyword.
Factors such as what did they put on their title tag, meta tag and keyword tags, you won’t know why this matters just yet, but we will cover these things in detail in the next chapter.
You also want to see how many back links they have. Keep in mind that this tool is not 100% accurate on back link information. I have yet to find a tool that is, but it will give you a good idea of how much optimizing a competitor has done. Back links are still a huge ranking factor for search engines as we’ve already covered. If a website has a lot of back links, it is a more competitive site to go against than a website who has very few. Sites with optimized titles, Meta tags, keyword tags and a lot of back links, particularly if these links are from high quality sites, will be difficult to out rank.
Not saying impossible, but if your website is brand new especially and this is your first SEO campaign you are doing, you want to target terms for your campaign in which the competition isn’t as steep.
As you are doing this competition research, I suggest taking notes either in a notebook or on a word document, so you can keep track of what sites are number one for the terms you want and how competitive they are. Write down how many links they have and what keywords they are targeting on their website with the following instructions.
Now just because a website has a ton of links, and it is listed in the top for the term you want, it does not mean it is a really difficult site to outrank for that term. I know it may seem that way, from the previous paragraphs, but let me show you how to know.
Go to that website, and right click it with your mouse. A menu will pop up and you will select view page source:
This will show you the code of the site. At the very top you should see a tag that says: <title> and then some words next to it. If the keyword or phrase you want to rank for is not in the title, then this would be an easy site to outrank even if it had thousands of back links. Same thing if you do not see the keywords in the Meta description tag below or the keywords tag which is below the description tag. However, if you do see that they are clearly targeting the keyword you want on their page, they are ranked well for and have thousands of back links, this would be very difficult to outrank just starting out. When this happens it does not mean it is impossible to outrank them, it will just take more work, and a lot of time and patience.
Here is a photo of how these tags look on the next page.
This always appears at the top of the page. A cool thing about doing SEO is sometimes a website with a lot of back links and good on-page SEO will rank for certain terms that they were not even optimizing for, just because they discuss it a little bit on their site and that term is not very competitive. If this is a term you want, and you come across this situation, then this is good for you because it will be easy to outrank them as long as your site is more focused on this term both on page and off page. We’ll talk about off page SEO in a few more chapters.
Another tool you can use to see where your competition got its back links is www.backlinkwatch.com. It won’t show you all of them, but it will give you a good idea of what sites link to them, so you could try to get back links in all of those sites and additional ones as well to outrank the competition. After all, you only need to be a little bit better than whoever is at the top to beat them.
We will cover off-page optimization in further chapters in section 2 of this book and then the reasons why you are looking at these metrics will make more sense.
Other things too look at would be the age of the top sites for the term you want. To check that information you can use the website grading tool at www.websitegrader.com. The older the site the more competitive it is. If you come across a situation where all or most of the websites on page 1 for a keyword have been around for several years, this could be tough. However, if they are not well optimized in back links or on page factors then this could be good.
You also want to take a look at the page rank of your competitors, the higher this number is the more difficult things can be. If you are a brand new site, it would be tough to outrank a website that has been around for 5 years and has a page rank of 4.
You may be asking, well what is Page Rank? Page rank is a link analysis algorithm named after Larry Page. It goes from 1-10, with most good sites being around a 3 or 4. Sites with high page rank above 5 or 6 are usually very well known big sites. To give you an example, cnn.com has a page rank of 9, Bloomingdales.com has a page rank of 6, and Facebook has a page rank of 9. This is an indicator you can use to see how “authoritative” Google deems a website to be. To see this metric, just download the Google Toolbar on your browser and click to display Page Rank.
Once you’ve analyzed your competition, choose the top 5, 10 or 15 terms you want to go after. Remember, these have to be terms that are rising in search, have some of the higher cost per click you found, are relevant to what you offer, have a good amount of monthly searches, and the competition is beatable. Don’t target broad terms.
In SEO you may hear something called “long tail keywords” which are key phrases that are several words and more specific. When starting out it is often better to target long tail keywords because those would be easier to rank for than shorter terms. For example, getting to page 1 for the keyword “real estate” would be much more difficult than “real estate homes for sale in Las Vegas”. Plus, a long tail keyword is more specific so the searcher may be more willing to buy at this point rather than a person conducting a broader search.
Last thoughts:
When you’re choosing the keywords your website will target you should always bear in mind the adage “less is more”. Sometimes selecting the keyword that will bring you the most traffic is not always the best option for your business, in fact it could be a big mistake. This is because it could be a difficult term to rank for and/or it could bring you a lot of traffic, but no buyers. You are doing SEO to make money, so don’t get stuck on just getting traffic, you need traffic that is willing and ready to buy.
Always start out optimizing for at least five keywords. If you optimize your website for just one keyword, not only are you narrowing your market but you’re also waving a big flag to the search engines saying, “Please Penalize Me”. Remember, search engines don’t like SEO – they don’t like people manipulating the results. If you target only one keyword it will be very obvious that you are performing SEO on your website and chances are you’ll be penalized as a result.
If
you have a new website, the chances are your website will be “sand
boxed for several months for any popular keywords. So if you target
your website solely for the most popular terms in your niche then
your website won’t even appear in Google’s search results (due to
being sand boxed) for several months and the competition for such a
popular keywords is typically very tough, so getting a good ranking
will be difficult. It is always better to have some traffic as
opposed to no traffic. This is why it is sometimes better to start
with long tail keywords and then work your way up to more competitive
terms, once you have some solid rankings.
Do this right and you are on the right track to have a very profitable SEO campaign. Read over this chapter several times if needed, this is one of the most important steps in the process.
Chapter 4
Defining Your Goals
After you have done your keyword research, competition analysis and honed in on the keywords you want to target, you need to set goals for your campaign. SEO is a very specialized task and it is a marketing function of your business. Search engines have the power to drive a high amount of targeted prospects to your site who are looking for your type of product or service. Therefore, it is very important that you set specific goals and objectives which can be measured. If your goals cannot be measured, then they are not useful.
Setting these objectives will help you determine whether you are getting a good return on investment from your SEO campaign. Whether you are doing it yourself or paying a professional to do it, it will cost you either time, money or both, so you want to make sure that this time and/or money is well spent.
First, you need to view this campaign correctly. If you view SEO like pay per click, which is something you can turn on and off at will depending on budget, is like seeing exercising as something you do when you gain weight, as opposed to having a healthy exercise routine weekly. With SEO, those who will see the biggest benefits are those are patient and committed. SEO is something you continually do once you start.
Now let’s talk about your branding goals as they relate to SEO. Often consumers assume that because a website is ranked highly in the search engines, it must be one of the top in their industry. If you use the search engines quite regularly, you probably know this assumption is not true, however many people still do.