How to optimize your website for search engines
Introduction to SEO:
I am here to help teach you all the secrets of the SEO trade I have personally studied to help make your business with your web site grow, whether you came across here looking for information on how to make money with GDI, or simply to educate yourself on Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
There are some myths about SEO that I want to make you aware of, if you stick to an ethical plan it will work out to your best advantage. You see most search engines such as google use highly complicated algorithms to rank and index your site after submission to their engines done by you the user. There are no tricks, or internet magic that gets you an equivalent position. Many factors are considered, such as age of site. The older the better in most cases. If you apply these techniques I am about to describe I do believe you will be both satisfied and have success with a great ranking once the engine indexes your URL or website address.
SEO Keyword Research
First and foremost you must I do repeat must research your keywords, if not done properly then you will find yourself constantly re-inventing the wheel. To do this go to Google's keyword tool CLICK HERE and bookmark this site for it will be one major SEO tool for your arsenal of techniques!
Step 1: Brainstorming Keywords for your site
For this example we will use my personal bog site to accomplish this first step in the SEO process.
Open up something such as notepad, or wordpad, or if you have it MS Word works best for me.
My site is about making money online with GDI.
Use keyword “phrases” think about what people may type in to their preferred search engine to find your sites, product, service, or their fulfilled need.
For my site I may use a list of these phrases:
Make money online fast
Make easy money online
Make money with social marketing
Money making tips online
IT money making business
These are just a few examples. Now cruise over to google’s keyword tool and copy and paste these phrases in to the box putting each phrase on a separate line. You should start with at least 10 general keyword phrases related to your own site. Check off Only show ideas closely related to my search terms. Enter the Caption code to verify your human if need be, and then click search. You should now see your results, your original Keyword phrases, and keyword ideas. In the left pane check off “broad” and check “exact” this is VERY important. Also under the columns drop down list uncheck “Competiton” and “local monthly searches” we are only interested In the global monthly searches being checked.
Now if you have MS Excel bring up a blank spreadsheet. Then click download – All in the google keyword tool. Go back to Excel – click the data tab – click from text – and import the file you just downloaded into your spreadsheet with the tab field separated options. At this point you should have 2 columns in excel, your generalized keyword list and your global monthly searches column.
WINNOW your list:
All these means is to go through your spreadsheet and delete the rows that do not fit for your website. If you think it doesn’t apply then lost likely your right. You are after targeted traffic and not out to fool those who go to your site. Now that you have scrubbed your list proceed to the next step.
Step 2: Find more specific keywords for your site:
Look through your general terminology of keywords and copy and paste some phrases that apply to your site with the most hits back in to Google’s Keyword tool and repeat this process, checking off exact, and hiding all columns but the global monthly searches.
Open up a new Excel spreadsheet and import this new downloaded keyword list in to your excel workbook. Again repeat the WINNOW process. At this point you should see the list of globally searched phrases dwindling down to fewer results. This is perfectly fine. This is what we want!
Now title a new column in excel Title Searches
Bring up google and without the brackets copy and paste a keyword phrase from your more exact or second list of phrases made into the search engine and click search. Pay attention to the number of results this is your competition. For example my phrase is “make money online for kids”. At the time of this writing under the search box there are 325,000,000 results! Ack! This is the competition?!?! Well don’t let your initial search scare you this is not the results we want. Now use the exact same search, but enclose it in quotes like this: “make money online for kids”. This tells google to match this exact phrase within a website. Now we are down to about 1,110,000 results for our competition. Wow still a lot of competitors out there. Lets take this one step further and improve on this even more! Add before your first quote allintitle:”Make money online for kids” this will tell google to look for this exact phrase in just the title of all indexed web sites. We are now down to 6,750 indexed sites on google with this criteria. This is fairly decent and a lot more reasonable to work with then the original 325,000,000 results!!!
Type the final search result value into your title search column next to the keyword phrase you used for comparison to the global monthly searches. This data will be VERY important soon. Now continue to do this allintitle”Keyword Phrase” Google search for all your keyword phrases and add the result values into your spreadsheet. Once this process is done we will find those keyword phrases that the SEO market refers to as “gems”.
Step 3: Figuring out your phrase gems
At this point you should have a specific keyword phrase list in excel with 3 columns the keyword phrases, global monthly searches, and title searches. Start looking through your list we are looking for the highest number of global monthly searches with the lowest title searches. For example you may see a global monthly search keyword phrase of 5900 with a title search of 122. This is a gem because this tells you users search this phrase roughly 5900 times a month and your competition is only 122 sites to compete with for a position on the search engine.
Highlight these gems by row in excel for later use.
Rule of thumb in the SEO business: If you are competing with 3000+ sites this is a highly competitive market. 1500-3000 moderately competitive. 1000-1500 Mildly competitive and under 1000 sites non-competitive because just because they have a ranking does not mean there site is optimized for the search engine. At this point you have a great chance of getting a great listing!!
WARNING:
Look out for phrases that look like gems but are not. The way you notice this is if you see a low global search number with a significantly higher title search number! These are people who may have optimized there site using great keywords, but do not realize the harm it is causing. If you have someone searching for a phrase that receives say 2000 searches a month and there are 7200 title search competing sites then most likely this will not drive targeted traffic to you because for such few searches and so many optimized sites competing for that click it most likely backfires with unrealistic expectations by not getting hardly any targeted traffic to your site from these warning phrases.
Updated on September 7th 2011 - More info coming soon!
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