It’s only natural for people to have a tendency to emphasize traffic over relevance, quantity over substance, and of course you need to always make sure that the search terms you’ve selected for targeting have sufficient traffic, but quite often you don’t want them to have too much either, since more traffic more times than not goes hand in hand with high competition.
Let’s look back to the Abilene law firm for example, which has decided they want to rank for the term ‘lawyer.’ Probably without realizing, the decision puts them up against almost all law firms in the entire English-speaking world, which of course include much larger and much more powerful firms. The last time I checked (two seconds ago), there are 406 million Google results for the search term ‘lawyer,’ and always remember there are only 10 listed on the first page of Google search results.
You must learn to choose your battles wisely when deciding on which keywords to target, and let’s examine just how you might go about doing that.
When it comes to assessing keyword competitiveness, there are several free tools. For example, the SEO Chat Keyword Difficulty Check Tool shows the higher the score the keyword search term gets, the more competitive the term, and the greater the difficulty it is to rank for. Remember that generally speaking, terms with a difficulty score over 60 require much more than just “on-page optimization” if you want the ranking on the first page of search results, and the first page ranking is right where you want to be.
Search Engines use algorithms that are well protected intellectual proprietary secrets and are continually evolving over time. It is important for you to focus on making your website as accessible as possible to Search Engines, while ensuring you have high quality content. Keep in mind these are well-established principles that are guaranteed to improve the rankings of your website, regardless of how the Search Engine algorithms continue to advance.
Search Engine Optimization practitioners can sometimes try to abuse the Search Engine algorithms in order to give their clients an advantage, and at times they might look to benefit and improvement through loopholes or sometimes shady methods. One simple example is using invisible text (white text on a white background) to “stuff” a page. Of course, this is invisible to the human eye, but Search Engines used to index this content, and if it is taken one-step further by stuffing the page even more with unrelated (but popular) keywords, it then becomes ‘spamming’. That was then, this is now and Search Engines are much smarter today and will definitely notice these sneaky tricks, and will heavily penalize any websites using such tactics and tricks.
Advanced Optimization is not simple and therefore carries risk if badly planned and executed. You should always keep in mind that what might work today is innovative, but runs the risk of heavy penalties in the future once people abuse it to the point where results are skewed, so always be careful of the introduction of any initiatives that fall into this class.
You probably have the question in mind that if you apply Search Engine Optimization management to your website, how long before you see the results? Understand that Google re-indexes websites every single day of the year, and it follows a process to ensure every entry contained in its vast database is re-indexed every 4-6 weeks. Google will also re-index sites like “news” aggregators much quicker, many times daily in order to stay most current. You can be sure that other Search Engines use roughly the same re-indexing timeframes, and therefore expect it to take up to 4-6 weeks before you can observe changes in the rankings.
You are still probably wondering if Search Engine Optimization will improve your ranking. Yes, but will they keep you there? No. Understand the Search Engine algorithms always continue to evolve over time and Search Engine Optimization is a form of marketing, and you therefore must have clearly defined processes of monitoring, interpreting results and tweaking.
Remember, Search Engine Optimization is not the only tool you need when creating and maintaining a profitable web presence, it is only one important component of your Web marketing strategy. Seasoned Web Marketers understand and realize that there is more to the Web than just search engines, as they know obtaining links from reputable websites, mixed with advertising using traditional media and ensuring your customers recommend you to their network of friends enjoy the same level of importance.
I think I’m safe in saying that anyone who operates a website wonders how to get it into the top 10 search results, and that one thought has created an industry with the tools and knowledge to answer this very question, and the process has come to be known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
Many say that SEO methodology has become more of an art employed to bring improvement to the ranking of a website in Search Engine results given certain targeted “keywords,” and I tend to agree with that consensus. You need to understand that “keywords” are the words or phrases that your target market uses most to limit search results to more specific sites including product or services that you might offer. To illustrate, you might want your website to rank high for “Disc Golf accessories,” but you couldn’t care less if it rates high for “Garden Supplies,” because that is NOT your target market niche.
Most people of course don’t realize that Search Engines are actually very limited software programs, which don’t have the intelligence built into them to understand everything they encounter on the Web. What they use is constantly evolving rules to score and rate a website’s capability to answer a very specific question, and now that we understand this knowledge, we can break down the Search Engine Optimization process into the following three categories:
HTML code: This is the part of Search Engine Optimization for programmers, since an in-depth knowledge and understanding of web coding standards and techniques is required, and typical software packages have historically produced poor results which take a lot of the human touch and intervention to ensure optimum results.
Tailoring the Content: When given a set of keywords, a Search Engine rates pages according to their respective relevancy, so that you have to build your content with those specific keywords always in mind. What is fundamental to determining just which keywords are relevant is a complete understanding of your target market niche, including knowledge of the typical questions they ask when searching for answers. Is important for you to know and understand there are websites (i.e. www.wordtracker.com, www.google.com/insights/search, etc.) dedicated to helping you determine the most commonly used keywords, and you should make extensive use of them.
Keep in the back of your mind throughout the process, that this is not a race of numbers to see how many keywords you can fill the page with, because there is an optimum keyword density. Too dense with too many keywords and it will be considered spamming, and you will most certainly be penalized. Too little, and you are neither ranked nor considered an authoritative source of information. It would be wise of you to dial in on a specific set of keywords, and remember you are trying to optimize for only those asking a specific question.
Most SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts will tell you that on the Web, content is king, however most importantly, you must understand that the content must be fresh content, and although article directories can be a great source of content, popular articles will be posted on hundreds or even thousands of websites, so how are you going to make your page and your words stand out and be noticed?
One way you can distinguish content that’s repeated is to wrap it with your own custom content both before and after the article, and another is to develop a regular routine to seek out newer and fresher articles and replace the older articles with the more current ones, and while this takes time and effort on your part, there are tools that are available to help both find articles and rotate them, and the more you follow the routine, the more skilled you will be a locating fresh content.
It is important to understand that if you can write, then creating your own content is really the best way to guarantee that your content is original and not contained on other websites, and even more important, it is also what search engines really love to find and index, but many people naturally feel very intimidated when they see a blank word processor file on the screen in front of them, so there are a few tips that can make the process much less difficult and stressful.
The topic you initially pick is critical to the process since if it is something you are knowledgeable about writing it will be easier, and it’s even better if you possess a real passion for the topic. Now when you begin the writing process you need to make sure the first copy is for yourself only, in other words, your first pass is creating a quick draft without having to worry about what others might think when they read your article. Remember, editing always comes later, and if you focus on just writing what comes to mind about the topic, you will find that you have plenty of content in a relatively short period of time, and at this point is when you can go back and edit the content to make it ready to publish. An important point to remember here is to think about what the target audience find most useful, and one really good thing about the Web is that the majority of readers have short attention spans, and as a result only like to read screen-size narratives rather than long tedious ones, so the good news is you are only looking at approximately 300-500 words!
Finally, when you get to the point that you want your content to lift your credibility or provide links back to your site, then there are many article directories where you can publish your work. But on the other hand, you might just want to put it exclusively on your own site, especially when you first start, and then with time look to the directories as well. Whichever you decide, after you have successfully published some content in the form of several articles or web pages you should find that once you adapt to the process, it isn’t very intimidating after all and you will be able to easily churn out lots of fresh interesting content for both visitors and search engines.
It’s only natural for people to have a tendency to emphasize traffic over relevance, quantity over substance, and of course you need to always make sure that the search terms you’ve selected for targeting have sufficient traffic, but quite often you don’t want them to have too much either, since more traffic more times than not goes hand in hand with high competition.
You must learn to choose your battles wisely when deciding on which keywords to target, and let’s examine just how you might go about doing that.
