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Computer Help
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Achieving higher search engine ranking |
The first and most important step to achieving higher
search engine ranking is to become crystal clear on which keywords you want to
target.
Why does this matter? Because people don't simply "arrive" at your website. They
have to find you. And the easiest and most common tool everybody uses is the
search engine. Google. Yahoo. MSN. And what do they type into these search
engines in order to find you? Keywords, of course.
1 - Provide a seed keyword - what is it all about?
A seed keyword is basically a root word. If you want to find out the best
keywords to target on the subject of world-class golf courses, your seed keyword
might be "golf course". This gives your keyword researcher a solid idea of where
to start.
2 - Provide context - what are you looking for?
Another important piece of information to provide is what types of words you are
looking for. Are you wanting to target names of golf courses, like "Pebble Beach
golf course"? Are you wanting to target locations of golf courses, like "golf
courses in Wisconsin"? Or do you even care? Maybe you just want any phrase that
contains "golf course". Whatever your intentions are is fine. It's just at this
step that you provide some boundaries for what you're looking for.
3 - Provide a target - how many keywords do you want?
This is a pivotal area. Most junior keyword researchers will run off and bring
you a list of a thousand keywords all of which have some loose connection with
your seed keyword. Wonderful. What are you going to do with those?
In later steps when you go to implement your search engine optimization strategy
you're going to discover that you can really only optimize a page for one or two
keywords. This means you will need to create at least 500 pages to use these
1000 keywords. Worse, you will need to acquire a competitive number of inbound
links to each of these pages in order to outrank your competition and get any
visitors from the search engines. This is a huge amount of work, which almost
certainly won't get done. So your SEO efforts will fail.
Don't do this.
Instead, provide a target to your keyword researcher. Far better for you to have
20, 30 or maybe even 50 keywords that are highly relevant and that you can
reasonably compete for than a list of 1000 that are out of your reach.
What you want your keyword researcher to do is find the information that will
help you decide which keywords to target.
4 - Provide directions - what specific info do you need?
In order to provide effective directions, you need to be clear on what
information you'll have to weigh in order to decide if a keyword is worth
targeting. This means you need to understand how search engines rank your web
pages compared with your competition.
First of all, search engines look at your individual web pages. They determine
how relevant your web page is to different keywords, which they derive from the
content and composition of your page. That's how they determine whether you're
even "in the running" to show up when people type certain keywords into the
search engine.
here is the process I like to ask my keyword researchers to follow:
(a) use a keyword research tool like Wordtracker to come up with an initial list
of 1000 keywords by using the seed keyword I described in step 1 above.
(b) manually go through that list and select only the highly-relevant keywords
according to the context I described in step 2 above. This probably pares the
list down to 50 or so.
(c) for each of the 50 keywords on this shortlist, individually go to Google and
type each keyword in to the search engine and look at the top 10 search results.
(d) for each of these top 10 search results (for each of the 50 keywords), go to
Marketleap and type in each of the web pages and record the number of inbound
links in a spreadsheet. It isn't important to record the URL's of each of the
competitors, just their search result rank.
Now, if this sounds like a tedious manual chore, it is! This is why it is
a favorite task to outsource. Chances are, if you're stuck doing it yourself,
you'll take shortcuts or just not do it at all. Far better to outsource this to
a reliable keyword researcher who will follow directions and produce the output
you request.
At the end of the day, you need to know which keywords to target and there is
only one way to get this information: diligent research. Outsource this
properly, and you are well on your way to better search engine ranking for your
website.
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Computer Help
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